


The Dragon Bride

by StellarRequiem



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Arranged Marriage, Caretaking, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/M, First Time, Prince Lindworm - Freeform, Sharing a Bed, altered timeline, fairy tale gore, moderate swearing, monster Zuko, you've heard of there's only one bed but have you heard of there's only one BATHTUB
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:33:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25235494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: When representatives from the Fire Nation come to the Water Tribe with the offer of peace through marriage, Katara knows what it is they're asking of her: Even in the Water Tribe people tell the story of the cursed "Dragon Prince" of the Fire Nation who was born a monster. Nevertheless, she accepts the marriage, planning to kill the the beast on her wedding night, armed only with three improvised whips, waterbending she must keep a secret from the Fire Nation, and an old myth.But the assassination doesn't go as planned. Katara instead wakes the morning after her wedding to find herself the wife of a handsome, young, andhumanFire Prince whose desire to appease his father soon entangles them with the young Avatar's mission to save the world. As if that weren't enough to deal with, that journey quickly becomes the background to a much greater struggle for both Zuko and Katara: trying not to fall in love with their spouse.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 58
Kudos: 187





	1. A Fire Wedding

Katara

____________________________

Katara sits at her grandmother's left hand knowing it’s where her mother should be. But she has no mother anymore, and the people who took her are across the table from them now: three Fire Nation representatives, staring at her with hateful, greedy amber eyes. The one in the center—an old man with a full beard—keeps watching her with a kind of horrible leer while he speaks instead of addressing Gran-gran.

“If a royal wife could be secured from your tribe,” he’s saying, “such an act of diplomacy would forever be rewarded. Name your price: trade? Riches? Or perhaps your independence? If that’s what you wanted, it could be arranged. Your borders would be yours to define, and your people would never see a Fire Navy ship on your waters again, for as long as you willed it.”

Gran-gran lightly purses her lips.

“And if we rejected your request?”

The old diplomat’s already horrible smile twists into something even more revolting.

“That, of course, would be the opposite of diplomacy, and acts of aggression—well. Let’s say that we can resolve the differences between our people right now, like this, or perhaps it is time to finish the war for the South. I have men enough to raze your tents and melt your huts if that’s what you’d prefer.”

“So you’re threatening us. My granddaughter for our lives.”

“That’s an oversimplification,” the man says, “but if it helps you to understand it, I suppose.”

Gran-gran's mouth becomes a hard line.

“Perhaps,” she says, “you should return when the chief is here for such a discussion. We will take the time to consider your offer—"

“I’ll do it,” Katara says. Her grandmother stops to look at her in horror. Her brother cries out her name. She blocks them all out, and looks hard at the Fire Nation representative. “I’ll do it if you tell me the truth about the prince I’m marrying.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says. He smiles with his jaw locked.

“Even this far south,” Katara says, “we’ve heard stories of what the Fire Lord banished to the mountains of the Earth Kingdom.”

“And what kind of stories would those be?”

Katara swallows. She can tell that the man knows what she means, but he’ going to make her say it.

“They say the eldest child of the Fire Lord is a monster.”

“He has at times been called the Dragon Prince,” the man concedes.

“But he’s not a dragon,” Gran-gran says harshly. “Your royal family hunted them to extinction for sport. So what is he?”

The man’s smile disappears. For a moment she thinks he won’t answer her, but perhaps he gets some twisted satisfaction out of trying to horrify her, or by implying that a monster is all a Water Tribe girl is fit to marry, because then he says:

“He’s _like_ a dragon,” he sounds almost bored. “From what I’ve heard. But without wings, and with layers of thick skin not quite scales. And huge teeth. They say he breathes fire, though, which sounds like a dragon to me. But in any case, a royal is a royal, and he’s claimed the right to a bride before the heir, his sister, can marry. And so a royal bride must be found. Are you that bride, young lady?”

He leers at Katara again.

Her brother is leaning around her grandmother to look at her, shaking his head, trying to tell her no. But all she can think about is how her mother should be sitting here, and she says “yes.”

***

“Katara, you _can’t!”_ Sokka is shouting. “It’s the fire nation! And a monster! It will probably eat you!”

“Not if I kill it first,” she says. Beside her, Gran-gran sighs. They’re alone in their hut. The Fire Navy ship is still docked on their shores.

“Eat! You!” Sokka repeats, tearing at his hair.

“Katara,” Gran-gran says, “how do you expect to kill a monster unarmed? You’ll never get a weapon anywhere near a Fire Nation prince.”

“I’ll say it’s ceremonial. They seem willing to let me have our traditions—”

“Yeah, Katara,” Sokka grumbles, “they’re making concessions because they’re not sure if there’s any other way to get you to _marry. a. monster.”_

“They threatened the entire village, Sokka. They don’t have to make concessions.”

“Oh, ok, so they’re letting you show up to a Fire Nation wedding in seal skin for some _other_ reason which I’m sure is much nicer. They’re still not going to let you knife their monster prince.”

“Unless they’re planning on that.”

Sokka drops his waving arms.

“That’d be a pretty convoluted assassination. I doubt it. Besides, who knows how much damage a knife would even do to that thing?”

“Then I’ll drown him,” Katara spits.

“So they can execute you or take you captive for being a waterbender instead!?” Sokka yowls.

Gran-gran sighs again and stands to lay a hand on his shoulder.

“Shouting won’t solve anything, Sokka. Katara,” Gran-gran turns to face her granddaughter, “you’re eighteen. You’re a grown woman. I cannot stop you from this. But I agree with your brother, if your plan is to hurt this creature, it won’t be that easy. You may have to survive alongside him a while, gain his trust—if he feels such things.”

Sokka makes a sound somewhat like the groans of moving ice, only higher pitched.

“We must learn everything we can about this creature,” Gran-gran continues. “We’ll draw out the plans for the wedding as long as possible, learn what we can. Sokka—the young men on the crew of that ship will want to get onto land for a while. Take them hunting with you—”

“ _What?”_

“—see what stories they’ve heard.”

“I definitely hate this,” Sokka says.

“Do you have a better idea?” Katara demands.

“Not yet, but give me five minutes. Anything is better than the you getting eaten by a dragon-monster plan.”

“If he just wanted to eat someone they wouldn’t come all the way down here, Sokka,” she starts, but Gran-gran holds up her hands to silence them both.

“That’s enough, both of you. Sokka, go. Katara—there’s an old story I know that reminds me of what that man described. It may help you.”

Sokka sputters for a moment before stomping out. Gran-gran moves back to the fur-covered cot and sits down, patting the space beside her. Katara sighs and joins her.

“What story could we have for _this?”_ she asks. “I know that there’s wisdom in old tales, but . . . how is any of that going to tell me how to kill a monster I know nothing about?”

“You don’t know nothing though, do you?” Gran-gran presses with a small smile. Katara bites her lip.

“No. I suppose I know about the fire, and the layers of skin.”

“That’s what caught my attention. Listen carefully, granddaughter. I have a story to tell.”

* * *

Katara’s welcome to the Fire Nation is brief. She arrives the same morning as her wedding, already dressed. She has no knife, after everything, but around her waist are tied three sturdy leather straps, acting as belts around far too many layers of clothes for this heat. Spring in the Fire Nation, she was told, is pleasant. The attendant who told her that—sent with the ship’s crew to fetch her—must be insane: the air in the palanquin is stifling, and it’s hard to catch her breath. Sweat beads on her brow that she fears to bend away. She wipes it with the back of her hand instead, then wipes her hand on one of the pillows surrounding her.

 _Breathe,_ she thinks. _Breathe. You have to stay calm. You can do this._ She has to do this. There’s nowhere to run at this point, and even if there was, she’s doing this for the tribe. She _can’t_ run. She has nothing now except for her own strength, a story, and the hope that when she kills the monster she’s destined to marry that the royal family will be glad to be rid of it. Maybe they won’t have her executed. Maybe they’ll banish her. The Fire Lord has a history of that, after all.

On the trip from the Water Tribe to the Fire Nation capital her attendant had reluctantly confirmed that part of the legend. It seems to be the Fire Nation’s worst kept secret: twin children born to the Fire Lord just before his coronation, one perfect daughter, one horrible monster sent into exile, disowned, but nevertheless royal. Apparently, in Fire Nation tradition, family is a powerful obligation. Powerful enough that a monster can come home and claim its right to a wife upon coming of age, just like its sister, though she’s been assured in no uncertain terms that the creature has no right to the throne despite being the older twin. _You will never be the Fire Queen_ , the representative had told her.

 _Good,_ she thinks. She wants as little to do with these people as possible. Not just the royal family, but the entire country. These people who man their army, who took everything from her, and from so many, so they could prosper on the backs of the rest of the world—or as much of it as they can reach. The last she’d heard, at least two major cities still stood in the Earth Kingdom, and the Northern Water Tribe had yet to fall. And if the contract of her marriage stands, at least now the Southern Water Tribe is safe, too. The whole world won’t belong to them. Not all of it. _If they honor our agreement._

She can’t stand to think of what could happen if they don’t. Or if they take revenge for the monster when she kills it. She remembers the nightmare tale of the Air Nomads, told like a warning to Water Tribe children, and it’s the one thing that could possibly stay her hand in killing the “Dragon Prince.” But Gran-gran believes in her plan. Even Sokka had parted from her with encouragement carefully disguised from Fire Nation ears. The risk of retribution is a part of her duty, now.

As the palanquin makes its way from the docks up the steep hill atop which the capital must be waiting, Katara tries to listen to the movement and voices around her to distract from the knot in her gut. The sounds of a shipyard, of strange birds and the crass shouts of sailors, changes to city sounds as they move. She can make out a myriad of voices both close and distant. The far-off ones sound strangely natural, just the sounds of civilization, of people talking and calling and working. Closer she can make out the hum of murmurs: people are talking about her arrival. Someone calls out “The Water Princess!” and she wants to order the palanquin to stop just so she can tell them there is no such thing. Her people have real leadership, not royalty.

Some of the voices they pass laugh. A few bold calls, demonstrating a surprising lack of fear for the guard she’s travelling with, jeer at her. She hears “Dragon Prince” in a mocking tone, and “monster” more than once. Some of the citizens of the Fire Nation seem as sure as Sokka was that this ends with her being eaten by a beast.

Alone in the close quarters of the palanquin, the light tinged a repulsive bloody red by the fabric around her, she closes her eyes and wills away the nagging fear that maybe they’re right, after all.

 _No,_ she tells herself again and again, _they wouldn’t go to the trouble of finding a ‘royal’ wife for something that just wants a snack._

Unless maybe the monster gets off on eating princesses.

 _Jokes on it,_ she wills herself to retort to her own mind, _I’m not a princess._ Maybe if she gets a chance she’ll tell it as much, just to rub its face in it. Unless maybe the Fire Nation royal family has already done as much: she’s gotten the sense since the representatives first came to the tribe that she’s some kind of joke in their minds. Maybe she’s as much a punishment as the beast’s banishment. A peasant princess from a tent in the snow for a malformed shadow of a dragon.

 _What a wedding,_ she thinks. One growing closer with every step the palanquin bearers take.

By the time they set her down, the sweat from her brow has soaked the pillows. _Seven layers,_ she keeps repeating to herself, counting her clothing items in her head, _it has to be seven. And then the whips. That’s the story._

She lays her hand down across her waist, against the belts. She’s still pressing her palm against them when she steps out of the palanquin.

Katara finds herself in a long hall. Guards flank either side of it. A well dressed man with a strange hat bows to her, calls her "my lady," and leads her into the palace, into the throne room: At the center of it on a flaming dais there sits a massive throne, the light throwing strange shadows across the face of its inhabitant. But she can’t spare a thought for the Fire Lord. Nor for the lovely, sad looking woman beside him who must be the queen, nor the sharp-eyed, red-lipped princess to his left. Her eyes catch instead on the creature resting before them. She holds her breath to keep from gasping.

The monster prince is no dragon, but some mockery of one. It has a long body blurring into a short tail, and two legs far enough forward to be arms with great claws on the feet and harshly angled elbows. Its body, with skin like leather covered in raised patterns like the pseudo-scales of a bird’s feet, is too dark and muddy a color to be called red or even bronze, and its face—too elongated to be human, and with golden eyes too large, yet hauntingly expressive despite the slit pupils—is mottled and blackened on one side, as if it’s been partially charred. Teeth extend visibly past the hard serpentine lips. Its expression, such as the monster has one, is far too cold for the firelight dancing off of it, throwing those terrible moving shadows over its eyes. She can feel it watching her even when it’s in darkness.

This is to be her husband. Her hand presses harder at her waist.

* * *

Fire Nation marriage ceremonies are short but the dinners that follow long. The gifts that are brought to the couple at the dining table are brought without words and without smiles from all except the sneering princess Azula and her father, whose lip twitches when he looks at Katara, and who sneers exactly like this daughter when he looks at the monstrosity of his son. Throughout the entire affair, the prince says nothing. He hardly even looks at Katara—certainly never when he thinks she’s aware of it. But she can feel his eyes from time to time. He never eats, either, and Sokka’s fears once more seem too close to the truth. She thinks about asking him if he’s going to eat just to goad him into confessing that it’s her who’s on the menu, but thinks better of it. If that’s what’s to come, she thinks, it’s better not to know. She can hold her head higher and with less effort if she’s not being sized up as a meal in front of every Fire Noble in the archipelago. This is no joke of a wedding, however much silent gloating the princess may be doing: it’s a massive affair. The room where they dine, though not decorated with the flames of the throne room, is hot with how many bodies are crammed into the space, even as the afternoon grows long and the sun fades from the windows. But none of the guests sit too near her—no one draws too close to the thing besides her. She can’t quite bring herself to think of it as her husband.

 _The world will be better without something like you in it,_ she thinks, glancing at the great beast at her side. Its body is as long as three men, and even settled low on its thick, knobby arms, it’s like sitting beside someone who’s standing. A monster towering over everything else: maybe this creature is the Fire Nation's natural form. _The world would be better without any of you in it._

Katara wills herself to eat more than she drinks. The Fire Nation seems to favor a warmed, smooth alcohol which makes quick work of many of the guests, but she needs to keep her head. Her head and her strength. She nibbles at food spiced beyond recognition—things that look like noodles just taste like heat—with ritual dedication, like the application of war paint to her stomach.

The first conversation she experiences in hours comes from princess Azula, the words dripping from between lips somehow still painted after eating, her mouth a bloody shade Katara imagines suits her vicious personality. She smiles and it’s even more monstrous than her brother’s exposed teeth because there’s so much joy in her mouth that doesn’t match the cruelty in her eyes.

“Zuko,” she purrs at the Dragon Prince. Katara has heard his names a few times tonight but it’s still jarring to try and think of him as anything other than “it,” and “the monster.” She looks at him sideways, too curious not to know how reacts to being spoken to, especially like this. His pupils swell to a rounder shape but he says nothing. “What are you still doing here? Isn’t it tradition for the bride and groom to go off to bed sooner rather than later? _This_ part of the celebration is for everyone else while _you’re_ off having fun. You’re not waiting for a speech or something are you? You’re not going to get one from Dad.”

“I’m not waiting on anything,” the monster, Zuko, says. His voice has a pitch to it like he’s rasping around smoke, something growling underneath it. It sounds horrible to Katara. Like something dredged up from the depths of the earth and then left on its surface to rot.

“Well,” Azula says, looking sideways and yet somehow _still_ down her nose at Katara, “I doubt she’s in any hurry, so if you’re ready to go, I imagine you’ll have to say so.”

She smirks. Katara can’t be sure whether the smile is at her expense, Zuko’s, or both.

“Actually,” Katara says, “I’m quite tired.” _I’m not afraid,_ she means. Not even to be alone with him. That’s actually what she wants.

Azula throws her head back and laughs.

“Not _too_ tired, I hope,” she says, laughter still clinging to the edges of her voice, “ _your_ night is just beginning—if my brother is up for it, anyway. I haven’t asked and really don’t want to know, persona—”

“ _Azula,”_ the monster growls, almost hisses. But Katara thinks she can hear something deeply human in it still, something somewhere between rage and embarrassment. “That’s _enough_.”

“Right, right, I’ll let you figure all that out together.”

She turns in a sweeping motion to put her back to both of them. She seems to hang there for a beat, trapped in space, and then she walks away. Something in her posture seems to laugh.

Katara glances at Zuko. The beast’s blackened, mottled left side is facing her. His great eye is trapped squinting, so she can’t make out his expression, only that he’s looking at her. He watches her long enough that, if she were prepared to concede anything to him at all, she might have felt compelled to fill the silence. His head inclines ever so slightly in her direction.

“Would you like to go?” he asks. His mouth barely opens, she’s not certain how he’s speaking, but it’s low and compelling and almost takes her aback. She swallows once, resisting the urge to clear her throat out loud.

“That’s, um. Yes.”

He lowers his head a little, looks away down the table for a moment, and then twists away from it. Katara flinches as his tail swings toward her, dragged wide by his about-face. He pulls himself with his arms, the movement more power than grace. She stands and follows him.

He moves a little more quickly than she walks, but she refuses to hurry after him, and so trails behind near the stump of his tail. It drifts back and forth across the dark flooring with a soft sliding sound. She watches his back.

 _This is it, Katara,_ she tells herself. Her hand drifts to her stomach again. She presses her palm against the knots of her belts.

She follows him down a long hallway which branches off at right angles giving her the impression of a palace of squares, the reasoning for which becomes apparent when he finally leads them into a room. He fumbles through opening it with his clawed hand, the finger-toes and their talons awkward in their movements. He opens it for her, expecting her to go first. She hates the instant this puts her back to him.

The room she steps into is massive, so much so that a little way inside there is space for a sitting area with a table and cushions, still several feet from a canopied bed large enough to fit a small water tribe hut. To her right an archway leads to a side room, she hopes for bathing. Along the other side of the room there is no wall, but a sliding screen into a secluded garden walled in on all sides: the source of the palace’s squares. In it there stands a tree overlooking a small pond, all of it surrounded by verdant groundcover and bright flowers. Katara has never seen a firework, but the bursting petals are how she imagines one to be. But she can’t appreciate them: her focus is on the pond, its depth, how much water she can sense in it. She may need water later. She still hasn’t ruled out drowning him. She isn’t an excellent bender, but she can do enough to bring a shapeless glob of it around his head and shove it in his face if it comes to it. She’d noticed at dinner a slow swelling and subsiding of the part of his body closest to what she’d call a chest: he does breathe. In that one way, he’s human enough. _If he can breathe, he can suffocate._

The door clicks shut behind her. She turns with a start from the garden.

It’s just them now. Alone, closed into this room. Far away from everyone down these winding hallways as if anyone would bother to come anyway if they heard her scream. Maybe that’s a good thing.

The monster stares at her from a few paces away. She can see his eyes sliding from her feet to her head and back, and she hates it. Being _looked at_ by him. She holds her hands against the leather tongs of her belts and imagines striking one across his eyes until he’s blind. If she’s smart, she’ll do that first. Or close to first. According to the story, she can’t hurt him just yet.

“Aren’t you hot?” he asks after a moment. It’s hard to read his voice, but it seems a kind of mumble.

“Are you asking me to undress?” she says, placing a defiant hand on her hip to give herself some illusion of confidence. The pose also seems like it should be more alluring, and according to Gran-gran’s story, alluring is a good place to start. The only place. Her body is the only bargaining chip that she has—she wants to retch imagining that he wants it, but she doesn’t know what she’ll do if he doesn’t, either.

His eyes—the good eye—go wide, the pupils blowing out to great dark holes instead of slits. His mouth opens just a little, enough to expose a hint of red tongue behind his terrible teeth. She speaks before he can say anything, though. It’s somehow worse if she has to hear him say “yes.” Like it’s his idea, not hers.

“I’ll do that,” she says, taking a step toward him, “if you take something off for me.”

He releases a short hissing sound followed by a disgusting guttural rumble from somewhere in his throat, the sounds blurring together into a kind of low, revolting gargle.

“What?” he asks. She can’t read his tone. “I’m not—”

“I heard you can shed your skin,” she says quickly, trying to get the image out of her head and the words off of her tongue, even knowing that she’s coming closer to making them a reality as she does. “And that it’s fresh and new and, and clean. Underneath. I want you to take a bath, too. If I’m going to get in bed with you. That is what you want, isn’t it? From your wife?”

She wills herself not to choke on the word.

Zuko’s mouth snaps shut, and he grunts. Says nothing. Just _looks at her,_ monster's face unreadable. She can’t stand it.

“Well?” she says, stepping forward again, closer to him, only feet from the end of his sharp snout. She tries to walk the way she once saw an older girl move for her husband when she thought no one was looking, the night before the warriors went away, with one foot almost directly in front of the other so that her hips sway. She doesn’t know how to look at him from underneath her eyelashes the way that woman had, so she looks directly into his unblinking eyes and holds them until sound brews between his teeth. His mouth opens once, closes. And then he says, in that depths of the earth, crackling way he speaks:

“Do it.”

_Got him._

Katara undoes her belts. She isn’t sure if she should do it quickly or slowly or if she should break eye contact with him, so she un-knots the leather strips with her eyes still on his. They’re easier to look at then the rest of him—almost human, even though they’re that strange Fire gold. She looks away only to toss them onto the low table of the seating area where they’ll be easy to find later. She looks back before pulling the outermost layer of her clothes—her mother’s shawl, square with a hole for her head—up and away from her. That she drops just beside her. If she survives long enough to need it again, she’ll have plenty of time to fish for it.

“Now you,” she tells the monster. He stares, unmoving. Katara waits. _Do it,_ she wills him, steeling her stomach for the sight, staring him down. _Come on. Do. It._

He looks away.

Slowly, he rocks back onto his tail, raising his arms from the ground. He towers over her like this. If he’s going to eat her after all, he could do it now. But instead he reaches up to the center of his chest and runs a talon down the middle of his body as if tracing some invisible seam. A fine, pale line appears in his bronzy underside, then splits open by half an inch to reveal a more vibrant layer of his strange bird-scales beneath, like light seeping through a crack in a door. He sinks his claws into the opening.

“You shouldn’t watch,” he says.

“If that’s what you want,” she replies, and turns her back to him before her relief can show on her face, her fear of losing the contents of her stomach to the sight of him peeling off his ugly skin less than her fear of his attacking from behind.

It takes several gruesome minutes. She watches the garden through the open wall, listening for the sounds of evening crickets and the disturbances of turtle ducks on the pond to drown out the dry whisper of his skin peeling, wishing she could plug her ears, or scream. Be anywhere but here.

When it’s over, he says:

“All right.”

_One down, six to go._

Maybe it would be better if he ate her, after all. She hides her grimace by keeping her back to him.

“My turn,” she says, and when she does turn to face him again she tries to toss her hair over her shoulder as she goes. Maybe she should have worn it loose, instead of the braid. Too late now.

There is no elegant way to pull the next layer—a tent of an overdress usually meant for warmth—over her head, so again she tries to make up for what she feels she must lack is sex appeal with confidence, holding his eyes with only a glance at how he looks without his outer skin. He’s brighter now than he was a moment ago, more red.

She drops the dress at her feet, holds his eyes for a beat, and turns again.

“Do it again,” she says, her confidence easier when she’s looking off into the room instead of the beast’s face. “I remove something, you remove something.”

“I don’t know if I can,” he says. She throws him a look over her shoulder.

“You won’t try?”

He looks down at his body for a moment.

“Will it make you happy?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. Then, feeling she needs more, improvises with: “it makes me feel like we’re both undressing.”

She holds his eyes for only a heartbeat after she says it. It’s all she can take.

“Ok,” he says. She imagines it sounds choked.

She glances at him once more, but he’s not looking at her. He’s sliding his claw down his chest again, so very lightly. She can hardly see the seam she opens in himself, and suspects this cut is shallower than the last. He may be a monster, but he doesn’t appear to be stupid: he seems to be accounting for how many of her layers he’ll have to match. She can only pray such foresight won’t ruin anything. Assuming there’s any substance to the story anyway—she looks out to the pond again, reassuring herself with the sense of nearby water. She thinks again _if he can breathe, he can drown._

This layer of skin seems to take him longer. It lifts from him with a wetter sound. She grinds her teeth to hear something else.

Her next layer doesn’t make her feeling any more alluring than the last, another underdress one wouldn’t normally wear in pairs. She’s trusting him not to know enough about the Water Tribe’s clothing to find that too odd. As she pulls it over her head, she’s aware of it pulling her hair loose into frizzy stray strands and she wonders, for a moment, if by the time this is over, he’ll still want to bed her enough for the next step of her plan. But he doesn’t complain. He peels away another layer of skin. Each time she turns to face him, she’s careful not to look at the pallid pile of it tucked behind him on the floor. Once glance is enough to turn her stomach, almost as bad as the sound. _At least it doesn’t have a smell._

She feels more desirable in her next layer, a real dress, ornately beaded and tight across her waist and close-fitting to her breasts, and she undoes its tied-shut back slowly. She can see him looking, his eyes moving down and away from her face.

 _Keep looking,_ she thinks. _It’s all you’ll ever get._

She turns her back again when she’s done. Waits for him to shed his skin. Every time takes longer. He emits a low hiss as he works. She doesn’t like to think of herself as a cruel person, but even as a monster, he’s a Fire Nation prince, and for that, a part of her hopes it hurts.

She’s down to her underthings, now, the soft shirt and pants that at home would be a last layer of fabric above her underwear to trap heat against the skin, and when she removes them, even though she looks at his face, she tries not to see his eyes. She can’t hold them while she does this: not as she exposes skin. She’s quick to turn her back again.

As much as she hates the wet sounds of his peeling skin, she waits in earnest for it. But it doesn’t come. And doesn’t come.

“Are you doing it?” she asks. Silence. Then a low “yes” she can barely make out, and the horrible wetness comes again.

And then there is only one layer left. This time, it’s hard to face him.

Katara has never been naked in front of anyone else, not as a grown woman. And now her first is going to be a monster. A Fire Nation prince. She grits her teeth so hard her jaw aches, willing herself not to cry. _You’ll get him for it,_ she thinks. _He dies for this._

_It will be over quick._

It will be over, and he will never look at her again. _Never, never again._

She turns around.

She can’t meet his eyes right away, but he isn’t looking at her, anyway. He’s seems to be watching her feet. The relief all but knocks the wind out of her.

Slowly, she starts unwrapping the final layer of her clothes.

As she undresses, she studies the Dragon Prince. The vibrancy of his color, this many layers deep, is harsh and too red, raw instead of rich. Looking at where his fingers meet his claws, she thinks she can see noticeable swelling. She was right, before, when she’d wondered if it hurt. It has to. There’s a sickly wetness to him everywhere, like the deep layers of skin revealed by a ruptured blister. It turns her stomach over hard. She swallows forcefully to keep from retching, several times in a row. Her vision swims a little. When he glances up, freezing when he meets her eyes, his look ready to swell shut. She wishes they would.

She holds his eyes as she drops what’s left of her clothes to the floor, hoping she can keep them there. She hates the idea of him looking down. Of him _seeing_ her. So much bare skin. _Only_ bare skin. This time when the tears come, she can’t hold them back, and so she turns before he can see them and bites her lip against the sound.

She can feel him looking at her back, and she hates him in her bones.

“You’re very beautiful,” he says. She swallows a sob and says:

“One more layer, my lord.”

This time when the wet peeling sound begins, it’s interspersed with more hisses and grunts than before, but she no longer feels guilty for being glad for how much it hurts him.

The last layer takes him a long time. When he says he’s done, and she turns to face him, he sounds tired in a way even his monster’s voice can’t mask.

She looks him in the eye, and tries to smile. She can only barely turn the corner of her mouth. It will have to do.

“Perfect,” she says, and she tries to purr it. She feels so vapid talking like that now that her clothes are gone. She imagines for a moment that it’s her who’s without skin, and that there is nothing but meat for him to see. Meat, right now, is all she can afford to be.

“Now,” she says, “come take a bath with me.”

“Whatever you want,” he says, and it’s low and harsh. “This way.”

He begins dragging himself toward the side room, and though his face isn’t human enough to grimace, she can tell by how he moves that every inch is hurting him. She picks up her belts from the table, and follows after.

In the Water Tribe no one really uses tubs for bathing—it’s too cold to submerge one’s self that way. They heat water and use soap and rags to clean the body. The closest thing she’s ever seen to the foreign concept of a bathtub is the wide troughs used to water beasts of burden. The palace bathtub is nothing like those. This tub is massive, opening up from one corner of the room to halfway across it, inlaid with dark stone tile. The water that comes from the gold filigreed tap that Zuko turns rises hot and clear with the faintest smell of sulfur, pumped from the deep volcanic heart of the island. Katara moves ahead, enraptured with it, and steps in eagerly, losing herself for a moment in the feeling of water on so much of her skin, pooling around her feet.

Making raw, grating sound as he does, Zuko pulls himself up over the lip of the bath with his arms, and falls in beside her with an ugly splash. Only after he’s in with her does he seem to notice the leather strips in her hands.

“What are those?” he asks.

“It’s a Water Tribe tradition,” she lies, instead describing a practice Gran-gran had told her was, at least at one time, popular in the Earth Kingdom. “Hitting the skin opens the pours to steam. It’s cleaner.”

“Is that really necessary?” he snarls. A hatred bubbles up in her—how dare he snap at her, this spoiled princeling whose whim for a wife has ruined her life, this monster masquerading as a husband, who let her strip for him, let her imply she’d take him to bed, let him _love_ her as if anyone from the Fire Nation, let alone a monster, could ever feel such a thing. It gives her the strength to play her part.

“Of course it is,” she says, stepping closer to him than she ever has before, inches from his lowered head, water rippling around her ankles and bouncing back and forth between them. “It makes people like new.”

Either her proximity or how she says it must throw him off, because he doesn’t protest again, just eyes her with what she imagines is a scowl while the water rises higher around them. When it’s around her thighs, inching toward the brim of even this great tub, he turns it off, hand swallowing the knob.

For a moment they face each other in silence, just the lap of water. It would be easier, she thinks, to just sit down and let the water rise up to her shoulders, let herself feel covered again, even if he sank in beside her. Maybe she’s done enough. Maybe all those layers of skin have wounded him and he’ll die of it if she just waits—but there’s no promise of that. And she’s promised him things, now, that she won’t chance him asking for when this "bath" is over. She will not have him touch her.

“I’ll do you, then you do me?” she says, swallowing her desire to hide and raising the leather straps in her hand, now apparent for what they are: whips. Short whips.

“If you insist,” he grunts. He seems to gather himself in anticipation of the first blow, head lowered, tail curling around his feet beneath the water. Katara breathes deep, too, raising her arm, gripping the leather. She only gets one first strike. It has to be debilitating.

For a second, just a moment, he closes his eyes as if to flinch, and she strikes. She snaps the leather through the air, putting a recoil into the swing with her wrist as she brings her arm down and slices the leather directly across his face.

The rest happens fast. He hisses and shrinks away but she surges after him, striking again and again until he rocks so far away from her that he falls over on his back in the water, submerged up to his long neck. Maybe it’s the magic that made him this way, maybe it’s just some twisted attribute of his body, but it seems to shorten as she strikes him, his head pulling down as if to sink away into his body to defend his face. She keeps hitting him. He doesn’t bleed but his skin parts under the blows into wide gashes with weeping insides. The whips over his head transect the flesh so fiercely that a chunk of it peels away down to the bone, creamy pale.

Only it isn’t bone. For the first time, Katara hesitates, trying to understand what she’s seeing. The strike against his temple has exposed the just of a cheekbones that’s all too human, and a nob of flesh the shape of, somehow, an _ear._ A real ear.

“What?” she breathes aloud, unable to swing again. The Dragon Prince, mostly submerged, seems small, suddenly, coiled in on himself with an arm raised to protect his face. Maybe he’s in shock, because he doesn’t take advantage of her pause to fight back or even flee. His long neck seems to have disappeared, his head directly atop his shoulders. His head with its human shapes hidden inside.

Like she’s moving through water, Katara finds her hand reaching for it. Some sane part of her screams not to touch him, to hurry up and beat him some more until she’s flayed him to death, but it's drowned out by the fog of the way that skin, _human skin,_ stands out from the gore of his face. Possessed by a horrified curiosity too deep to be stayed by revulsion, she sinks her nails into the raw red monster flesh at the edges of the opening where she can see the ear. She drives her fingers down into the hot wet, scraping that too-human cheek bone. She can feel skin on it, real skin, human skin.

Like skinning the blubber from a seal, she rips a length of monster-flesh from his face.

The flesh doesn’t resist her. It peels away from his temple and across his face to his nose, and as she pulls, the whole heavy mass of his snout, clanking with teeth, comes away from the rest of his face. With a final pull she leans her torso into, a violent yank, the flesh pulls back all the way to his other temple and rips free. She drops the ugly meat of his entire face into the water with a splash.

In the place where his snout was, his monster’s head, is a human being. A man’s face, the age, maybe, of her brother, with a fine black eyebrow and a thin but pretty mouth pulled into an agonized grimace. Like the monster’s face, the left side of the man is marred with a mottled, reddened scar. His eyes are shut, but she suspects that if he opened them, they would be the same dark gold as the beast’s.

The whips drop from her hand into the water.

“What are you?” she breathes.

Gran-gran had told her a story: a chief cursed to become a horrible monster with many skins, slain by a maiden who got him to strip them away by matching him layer for layer with her own clothes, then beating his soft low layers of flesh until they peeled from his bones. _Bones._ That story ended with bones and a dead monster. Not a man. Not a _person._

The face inside the monster opens his eyes, blinking weakly. They _are_ gold. His mouth opens without sound, and he has to close and open it a few times before a broken, rasping, and clumsy “What . . . is . . . this?” makes it out. He talks like he doesn’t know how to shape his lips around the words, only his tongue.

Katara doesn’t answer. She just bends over him and sinks her nails into the raw, wet monster flesh still encasing what she now expects to be a human form, and starts tearing. She rips off strips of it, meat catching under her nails, weeping a slimy residue onto her hands, but she keeps pulling, dropping slabs of monster into the water as they come loose. She exposes the rest of a head densely covered in wet ropes of black hair long enough to maybe reach his shoulders if it were dry. She reveals sculpted shoulders with striking collarbones, muscled arms. She peels flesh off of them like gloves from the elbow, ripping claws from fingers while he blinks and squints around sweat and slime at what she’s doing. He drags his other arm across his eyes, the limb hovering in front of his face for a moment before he manages to make contact like he still doesn’t understand how much of his monster’s head is gone. _Can’t he feel it?_

When he drops his arm he looks at Katara, still peeling shreds of flesh from between the fingers of a human hand. She pauses to meet his eyes.

“You . . . “ she starts, but she doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. He looks down at her hand. At his hand.

He stiffens.

For a moment he sits there, staring, without even seeming to breathe. Then he pulls his hand out of her grasp. His motions are slow. His arm and hand shake. He stares down into his own palm and flexes uncoordinated fingers once, twice, before looking up at Katara’s face. His lips part without sound as he meets her eyes, so much emotion in his face that for a moment she feels for him without reservation, without care for who he is and what he represents. He becomes nothing but a man, a young man, scared and conflicted and moved, and in that split second she’s able to think _he has kind eyes_ before they roll in his head and fall shut and his body goes slack. He faints backward toward the now murky water with a splash, and she can hear his skull hit the edge of the tub with a thud.


	2. The Dragon Prince

Katara

________________________

Katara lunges on instinct for the unconscious prince, coming down on her knees in the tub with a splash. She catches him before he can slide down into the water, holding him against her bare chest. It happens too quickly for her to feel shy about that—and he remains unconscious anyway. She reaches awkwardly around the back of his head and her fingers come away a little bloody where his skull has hit the edge of the tub, but head wounds bleed: It may not be critical.

Staring at the bright red blood on her fingertips, it occurs to her that she should want it to be critical. She came here to kill a Fire Prince, after all. Dropping him into the water to bleed and drown would be the easiest thing in the world. But somehow, she can’t do it. Her arms won’t release him. She kneels beside him with his body held against hers, looking into his face and its just so . . . _human._ She tries to imagine watching him sink beneath the water, knowing he’s breathing it in, and just letting it happen. Her, sitting and watching a person drown.

_Is that who I am?_

She swears under her breath. The answer is no.

Besides, she consoles herself as she leans him up against her body, laying his head back on her shoulder with her arms under his as she goes back to work stripping monster’s meat from the human beneath, the Fire Nation might have forgiven her for killing a monster, but if the prince has become a man, the cost for killing him is probably higher. She stands a better chance of escape instead of execution as the woman who freed him than she does as the woman who freed him just to kill him.

She does not allow herself to think about how unlikely it is that they’ll thank her by letting her leave. That his surviving their wedding night means there will be a next day, and a next day, in which she has made an oath in marriage that she will act as wife to one of the people who took everything from her. That was part of the risk she took in agreeing to the marriage, in trying to save her tribe. There’s no use dwelling on it now. All there is now is to keep moving. She feels like this bathroom is the whole world, like everything else outside of it has stopped. She can’t even bring herself to scream for help, unable to believe any would be forthcoming, convinced in some deep intuitive corner of her mind that no one can hear her right now. It’s just her and this man and whatever spell makes a person emerge from a monster—surely this is magic, some spirit curse, and the spirits have strange rules. She imagines this frozen moment is the only one she has, not knowing how she knows it, but certain that if she doesn’t finish what she’s started that he’ll go back to being a monster with the dawn, and then all of this will have been for nothing.

Holding him above water and peeling him free of his tail is awkward and uncomfortable. She grasps for flesh under the water, sure she’s scratching his human skin as she feels for the blubbery monster flesh, grabbing fistfuls of it to pull up, underneath which she can feel the shapes of legs and other things that turn her cheeks hot and red: Katara has seen naked babies and children before, she grew up with a brother who was still shamelessly young when she was old enough to form memories, it’s not that she doesn’t know what male genitals look like generally, but she’s never seen or felt a fully grown _man,_ and it’s all larger than she was prepared for. She’s quick to retract her hand.

At some point she finds the plug for a drain with her foot and pulls it open, letting the water down until it’s low enough she can lay him on his back in the disgusting soup of flesh they’ve made without his face submerged. It frees her to move round to his legs, still buried up to the knee in a monster’s tail gone soft and waterlogged. Eventually she resorts to wrapping her arms around it and pulling—it’s like lifting a seal-whale in and of itself—with her foot on his thigh to brace his legs. Wet and weak, the flesh slides free of him at last with a wet sucking. She grits her teeth swallows against the swell of nausea that inspires, and when she drops the empty sack of meat that was his tail again, she quickly covers her ears so she doesn’t have to hear it slap into the remaining water. It’s turning pink now with the blood from the back of his head. She needs to do something about that. She needs to get the cold, wet, naked man now lying at her feet dryer and warmer if she’s truly committed to keeping him alive.

Dragging Zuko out of the bathtub is awkward and exhausting—there’s a tiredness creeping up on her now that seems determined to keep her from getting either him or herself out of this bathroom. It drags at her eyelids and weakens her muscles. Where she’d had so much strength before, beating and clawing at him, it’s beginning to feel like she’ll never be able to lift his head, let alone his torso, to drag him to bed, which seems like the logical place. But she manages, somehow, and she resists the urge to call out uselessly for help she can still sense will never come. She puts her hands under his arms and pulls, back and legs straining, to slide him out of the bath and across the room.

Getting him into the bed itself is the worst. She has to hold him around his waist, around his legs, shove him with her shoulders. She smacks herself across the cheek with his knee in the process, which does a great deal to knock whatever mercy she’d started to feel for him and his strange situation back out of her.

Once he’s in bed, she rolls him over on his side to look at his head. She feels through his damp, still slightly slimy hair and finds his scalp has split open where his head met the lip of the tub, an inch and a half gash weeping blood as only a head wound can into the mess of his hair. But the deeper layers of flesh look untouched, from what she can see. Katara has helped treat enough wounds in her life to know that this one is one which looks worse than it is—a bitter kind of relief, in its way.

She leaves him for the bathroom again, where she searches around and finds a small towel which will fold to a size that works for her purposes and returns with it in hand.

Halfway through the room, she stops short, a wall of exhaustion rising up to meet her that feels like it could physically knock her down to fall asleep right here in the middle of the floor. She blinks, trying to take the room back into focus. Her mind makes strange dreamlike patterns out of the pile of his pallid skins on the floor near the door—they aren’t so revolting, now, compared to everything else she’s just seen. Her own clothes not far from them, laying in a heap, make her feel like she’s looking at her own lost skin, too, like she’s crawled out of her real body and become something else in the course of this night, and she hates it.

She looks down at the rag in her hand, up at her clothes. She’s so tired. If she goes to her clothes, she’s not sure she’ll ever make it back to the bed. She’s so ready to lie down on one of the cushions of the seating area and just drift away, be done with monsters and princes for the night. It’s only some vague sense of obligation to the tribe—which her mind isn’t articulate enough to explain better than _marriage, tribe, safe, prince, safe_ , _prince safe tribe safe_ —that makes her turn to the bed instead of the comfort of her clothes, her familiar skin.

Katara climbs into the bed from the other side, sliding beneath the covers. All the bed things are red, smooth like fine silk, so unlike the furs she’s slept under all her life. She drags herself across the bed until she’s perhaps six inches from the unconscious prince and falls into the pillows. She’s so, so tired. It’s like lifting a brick to bring the rag in her hand around to the back of his head to press it against the wound, and she has to rest her arm on his shoulder to hold it up.

She’s still pushing against the wound with her arm over him when she loses the battle to sleep.

Zuko

_________________________

It’s late when Zuko wakes, he has a distant sense of the sun being too high in the sky even before he opens his eyes. Lingering exhaustion that keeps him half in the space of dreams won’t allow him to admit he’s awake, and he squeezes his eyes shut. The left side of his face feels stiffer than usual, the scar tissue groaning against the pull of other muscles—too many, like there are parts of him moving that shouldn’t be.

The more awake he becomes the more aware he is of a wrongness all over his body: he feels cold and exposed, his neck stiff and his arms cramped up from being folded in front of his chest in sleep. He feels a little like someone has beaten him all over—the deep ache of bruises scattered everywhere, and at the back of his head is a tenderness that won’t even tolerate touching the pillow. There’s a weight across his shoulder and he’s sleeping on his side, somehow, instead of curled up on his stomach like he likes. Mechanically, he’s never _been_ able to sleep on his side: his arms stand out wrong for it.

His arms.

Zuko’s eyes snap open. He remembers his _arm,_ his _hand,_ pale fingers with short nails and no claws, like a real person’s hand, somehow coming out of his body like it belonged to him—

In front of him in bed, bathed in the light coming in from the garden, is Katara. She’s sleeping naked with her arm thrown over his shoulder, lips barely parted, breathing the slow rhythm of sleep, nothing in her expression to indicate that she’s anything other than a normal woman, if foreign-looking with her dark skin and strange hairstyle. But surely, she’s a spirit. Or a witch out of a story. She has to be, because when he looks down to his arms and hands on the mattress between them, they’re still human, with smooth skin pale from never having seen the sun before. He pinches the back of one hand—his fingers so nimble now they feel like they’re moving too fast for him to control—and he can feel it. They’re _his_ hands. His _human hands._ He reaches up with one, slowly, his muscles responsive but laid out in strange ways that make the movement feel too simple, and places his fingertips against his own cheek. He can feel so _much_ —

The right side of his face is smooth, like his hands. Inching his fingers up over his eye he can make out the stiffness of lashes and the long line of an eyebrow, and above that softer hair stuck together in clumps under a film he can feel elsewhere on his body, too, some last remnant of his other flesh. He wants to scrub it off immediately.

Instead he drags his hand down the other side of his face to see if it matches the first. His hand freezes, because it doesn’t. His father’s mark remains. He can feel no brow on that side, and the skin is mottled and stiff—like it’s always been. He closes his eyes again, and presses his palm down across his face. He immediately wishes that he hadn’t as he realizes the way his scar aligns with the shape of a human palm—so that’s how his father did it. Skin to skin with his hand on fire, so he couldn’t miss. He snaps his hand away from his face—

\--and smacks his new wife directly across her cute little nose.

Even asleep, she has impressive reflexes. If there were any Southern waterbenders left, he would wonder if she was one of them. She jerks backward before she has even opened her eyes, hands rising to her poor nose at the same time that she kicks one foot out. For the first time in his life he’s aware of the sensation of having legs as she kicks him directly in the shin. The first he’s aware of his human voice is the yelp that follows. It’s a higher pitch than he would have expected.

Katara, too, is groaning.

She sits up a little, rubbing her nose and muttering to herself. Sunlight pouring in from the garden catches in stray strands of her hair and lights them from the inside, bringing red up from the brown. Her hair is so different from Fire Nation types, dense strands that break free into waves and curls wound into a braid as thick around as her forearm, and he imagines it’s softer than the slick texture on his own head, than he imagines the long, straight-hanging hair of the rest of his family. He wonders what it looks like out of its braid, and imagines it must be beautiful. He’s still musing on it when she turns her head to glare at him and demands:

“What was that, payback?”

“What?” he stutters. The harder he thinks about speaking the more difficult it is, too many new muscles and motions to keep track of, less tooth in the way.

“For beating you up all night? I hit you, you hit me? Is that how this is going to go?”

“No, I, no—sorry. I didn’t mean to. I mean, I would never. Hit you.”

She glances away from him and bites down on her lip, momentarily enamored with the stitching on the bedsheets. She pulls them farther up her chest, almost to her neck, before looking at him again. She fixes him with those sky-blue eyes and his thoughts slow to a crawl. It takes him a couple of tries to form words, as if he knew what to say. He hasn’t known what to say to her once since she was first introduced to him—there weren’t words he could offer to express everything there was that could need saying. The apologies he owed her for being what he was, though he’d been assured she was a willing participant. The questions, too: what possessed her to say yes to this in the first place. The thanks he owed her for even looking him in the eye. He hadn’t known how or when to say any of that before and he doesn’t know how to start now, though it feels like he has to say something. Finally he blurts:

“How did you know to do all that last night? You saved me. I didn’t know that was possible.”

“There’s a Water Tribe legend about a chief who was cursed to become something that looked like . . . you. In the story a woman seduces him to trick him into taking off his skin,” that stings, turning memories from the night before dark and ugly with the understanding, which had evaded him at the time, of what could have possessed her to undress for him, to insinuate—

But no, this makes much more sense: she’d never intended for him to touch her.

Katara continues, unaware or uncaring of the sinking in his chest she’s inflicted.

“And then” she says, “she beats him with whips. The bath seemed like the best excuse for that part.”

“And he becomes a human being?”

She looks him hard in the eye, pursing her lip for a moment as if considering her words. Then she breathes in deeply—the sheets covering her body shifting, and she says with the same unblinking, fearless cool with which she’d looked at him last night:

“No. In the story it kills him.”

Even though he’s lying on his side, his stomach feels like it’s plummeting toward his new feet. His chest clenches. The strangest sensation of a tingling and cooling drains through his face, and he hates it immediately. He pulls that anger up like a shield. Hiding behind it, he tries to stoke words from his pain.

“You tried to kill a _Fire Nation Prince?”_

“I tried to kill a monster I was forced to marry—but same difference, come to think of it.”

“No one forced you into anything. I specifically said—”

That had been his only condition: his bride had to be willing. It had been a condition he was counting on no one being able to meet any time soon.

Katara stiffens, clutching the sheets to her chest. She glares down at him from a halo of sunlight, framed like a fire spirit.

“ _You_ said to threaten my tribe until I agreed? To barter our freedom for my marriage? Because that’s what happened.” She stares him down with fury in every line of her expression. “We were made an offer—the Fire Nation could leave forever, or they could burn down our homes. Of course I cooperated.”

“Burn down your homes? What, on the spot? That would be pointless, that makes no sense.”

“The man in charge called it an “act of war’ for refusing the ‘diplomacy’ of the wedding.”

“Then that was different.”

“That’s polarbear-dog shit,” she hisses. It takes him aback for a moment: royal tutors secured by his uncle, the only people he’s ever been around before coming to the capital, and certainly no one _here_ , would speak so crassly in front of a prince.

He drags himself to a sitting position, struggling to make bending at the waist cooperate for him but relieved to find his arms can still lift him. But before he can manage a retort she hisses:

“I agreed to this to protect my people. I did it under duress. And when I agreed to it, my plan was to be a widow by now. I had no idea that, that,” she waves a hand at him.

“That I was a person? So what did you think was going to happen, that you were going to beat a monster four times your size to death and then what? Go back to the South Pole? If you were trying to stop a war, you were pretty stupid about it,” he spits. Katara’s eyes narrow.

“I don’t know. Having met your family now, I think they might have thanked me.”

Stricken, for a moment he can only stare at her, fuming. A thousand retorts die before they even reach his tongue. She’s wrong, of course. His father would never have thanked her for anything. He doesn’t tolerate people taking what he sees as his to control. He would have been furious. He can’t bring himself to admit to himself, in so many words, that he also would have been pleased.

Finally, he manages to say, “Well, they’ll definitely thank you now. But it still won’t get you home.”

That strikes a nerve. Her nostrils flare and her temple pops and she whips around to face dead-ahead toward the doors, pointedly not at him. She clutches at the sheets so hard her knuckles go pale.

She stays like that for a moment, then closes her eyes and breathes deeply. For just an instant something crosses her face that’s gone too quickly for him to read, and then she sighs and looks at him again.

“Fine. You’re right, it won’t. So now what? Are we still married if you’re a different person in the morning?”

“I’m the same person,” he snaps. “You, on the other hand . . .”

“I’m exactly who I am: the person who took on a monster and won.”

“I don’t think making a human being when you meant to make a corpse counts as winning.”

“It’s a win for you, isn’t it?” she snaps. That he can’t argue with. “You should be thanking me.”

“For trying to _kill me?_ ”

She opens her mouth and snaps it shut.

“Fine,” she grunts. “Don’t thank me. Don’t even speak to me, why don’t you.”

“For how long, the rest of our lives? You married me, remember?” he says, scowling.

She looks away from him again.

“Yes,” she says through her teeth. “I guess I did. And _you_ married me: a Water Tribe chief’s daughter who shouldn’t be counted as royalty, who your family clearly thinks of as a peasant fit only for a beast. You must be so excited about our future.”

“That’s true enough,” he retorts. He doesn’t bother to correct or reassure her: she’s right. His father chose her for him as the most underhanded, insulting, bare-minimum of his paternal obligation as he could manage. He probably hadn’t counted on her being the most beautiful creature Zuko has ever seen. Any complaints he might have harbored died the second he saw her—but he isn’t going to tell her that. It’s clear she doesn’t want to hear it, and at this moment there’s a wall of anger between him and anything nice he might say to her, anyway.

So they sit in silence for a while, not looking at each other. Zuko stares daggers into the mattress, fighting with himself for something intelligent to say. Nothing comes.

After a while she says:

“Are you going to tell them I tried to kill you?”

“I could. You probably don’t want me to.”

“Why not?”

He steels himself to meet her eyes.

“Because murdering a royal—any royal,” he looks at her pointedly, “is treason. And that’s punishable by death. Life imprisonment if you’re lucky.”

“I’m not afraid,” she says.

“You should be. Did anyone in your tribe know what you were planning?”

“My tribe had nothing to do with this,” she snaps, too quickly and too harshly. Her emotions have given her away, and from the fear in her eyes, he can tell that she knows it.

“Right,” he says. “Sure.”

“They didn’t. No one. I swear—”

“I won’t tell him,” Zuko says, interrupting her. The sigh of relief she breathes is loud in the quiet room and her voice is softer when she speaks next.

“You won’t?”

“Not unless you do.” Admitting he walked willingly into what was supposed to be his death won’t put him any closer to recognition from his father, and that’s all this has ever been about. Something, anything, to bring him back into the birthright he was robbed of by whatever curse made him that thing, starting with something that could get him into the capital, then whatever it took from there.

Katara is quiet for a while.

“Thank you,” she finally mumbles. He looks at her and she adds “for protecting my people.”

“The Fire Nation’s plans for the Southern Water Tribe have always been to prevent them from becoming a threat, but not much else. From what I understand, there isn’t any infrastructure down there worth having. It would be a pointless war.”

Katara makes a sound of revulsion.

“Our _culture_ is worth something,” she spits.

Zuko looks down at his new hands.

“Maybe it is.”

When he looks up at her again he can’t read her expression, but she can’t seem to hold his eyes with the same fury as before. She looks away quickly, out toward the garden.

“So,” she says, sighing. “Now what?”

“Now we go show my father what you’ve managed to do. Immediately. Er,” he looks at the arch of her bare back, her bedraggled hair, then down at his own bare chest. He’s better muscled than he might have hoped after a life of dragging himself around by just his arms. He wonders, for a split second, if, aside from his scar, he could even be handsome. But the scar looms too large in his mind to ignore, and he dismisses that thought quickly. It’s probably for the best, besides: he doesn’t know how to be anything but ugly.

“What?” she says.

“I was going to say we should get dressed first, but . . . “

“But?” she says, her body tensing.

“But,” he says, and it’s almost funny, somehow, though he can’t quite bring himself to laugh, “I don’t own any clothes.”

Katara

_______________________

The first time Zuko smiles, reflecting on his new need for clothes, feels to Katara like being smacked in the face. It isn’t evil. It isn’t even ugly. It’s quiet and sideways and closed-lipped and puts a little crinkle under his good eye. She looks away immediately, heat in her face from a standoffish fury she can’t quite pin down.

“You’re not clean enough to get dressed anyway,” she remarks. Out of the corner of her eye she can see him run a hand through his hair and grimace, destroying the little sideways smile again. He’s easier to look at after that.

“Good point,” he says, and turns away from her. The more he talks, she notices, the better he enunciates, like he’s learning how to have a mouth by acting on instinct. She tries to watch him without looking too interested in what he’s doing as he awkwardly arranges his legs over the side of the bed, mostly by holding himself up on his arms and swinging from the waist, like he doesn’t know how to use his hips or bend his knees. He props his feet against the floor and hesitates there for a moment. It occurs to her that he genuinely might not know how to stand up. If he were anyone else, she might be tempted to help him, but being human hasn’t made him any less of a spoiled, rotten, possessive little Fire Nation princeling as far as she can tell and for all she cares, he can fall on his face.

He tries to hoist himself up onto his feet by pushing with his arms, and does exactly that. He hangs in the air for half an instant somewhere near standing but then his knees go out and he crashes face-down into the floor with a grunt.

“How the . . . ?” he sputters between gritted teeth.

“Having trouble with legs?” she asks, peering at his bare back over the edge of the bed. Only his back. She keeps her eyes firmly fixed on a point no lower than his shoulders, watching them flex and shift as he pushes himself halfway off the floor with his arms.

“You could help, you know,” he snaps.

“What, is one of my wifely duties dragging you around? I did plenty of that last night already. Don’t you have servants or something for that?”

She’s genuinely not sure what the answer to that will be—the idea of servants is such a foreign concept to her, she can’t begin to imagine where their duties might begin and end. This _would_ absolutely be her job in the Water Tribe: at home, spouses support each other. Of course at home, spouses come together by choice.

“Sure. Stick your head into the hall and call somebody,” Zuko grumbles from the floor. “Have fun explaining this.”

“I thought I’d let you explain it,” she says, throwing back the blankets and sliding out of bed in a huff. With him still mostly face-down this is probably her best chance to make it across the room to some clothes without being _looked at._ “It’s your curse, or whatever.”

“It’s my curse but your doing,” he says, “it’s your problem, too, if no one believes this.”

“I’ll deal with it,” she says, and sets to digging through her clothes. If she looks as bedraggled as she feels there’ not much point in dressing up—she slides on one of the overdresses with nothing under it just to have something between her skin and wandering eyes, thinking it will have to be good enough.

On the floor between her and the door the dry, papery ghosts of seven layers of monster’s skin are still piled. She steps around them with a grimace, but they’re no longer enough to make her stomach turn.

It takes more effort than she expected to get the heavy, ornate door open. She has to put her shoulder into it to make gap enough for her to stick her head out. Across the wide hallway are two women, one she recognizes as her attendant from the ship here.

“Uh,” she says, “excuse me?”

“Yes my lady?” the two say in unison. It’s horrible. She’s no one’s _lady._ She isn’t better than them. She wishes they’d stop looking at her with awe—or maybe that’s just surprise to see her alive. Maybe they thought she was going to be eaten, too.

“Can I, I mean,” she scrambles, not sure how she should be talking, if she should sound like she’s giving orders, “would you please bring some things in here? We need,” she thinks of the dragon skin on the floor and feels a moment of abject dread over what must be waiting in the bathtub, “cleaning supplies, and a really big bucket, probably, and some men’s clothes. Please. And maybe a couple of men? It’s for, uhm. For the prince’s bath.”

“Certainly,” says the first woman.

“Right away my lady,” says her attendant. They both turn to leave.

“Wait,” Katara says. They both stop and about face. Like mirror images of each other, like they’re not even people. She hates it. With every fiber of her being, she hates it.

“Someone should also tell someone, I guess . . . the . . . I can’t really explain it, but . . .”

Over her shoulder, she hears Zuko call, with a voice full of authority he has yet to turn on her, “Tell the Fire Lord the prince’s curse is broken.”

Both servants’ eyes widen.

“Broken?” one asks.

“Yeah,” Katara says. “I broke it.”

Her attendant takes a step forward, maybe the only one bold enough of the two to question her directly, or maybe she’s just more assertive.

“My lady, what do you mean, ‘broken?’”

“I mean,” Katara says, taking a deep breath between the words, “I made him human.”

* * *

The rest of the morning is a whirl of people, some seven or eight servants trailing a fiery-eyed princess Azula who bursts in without knocking to find Katara standing with her eyes on the garden and Zuko having just barely managed to pull himself back into bed and cover himself up. The first thing out of her mouth is “prove it.”

Zuko sighs.

“The first thing you said to me when I got here was ‘so this is big brother Zuzu—you really _are_ ugly.’

“That’s not all I said,” Azula sneers.

“You know what else you said.”

“I need to hear it,” she says airily. “I have to know it’s you, and not some scheme your water peasant wife cooked up to get out of marrying a monster. Which I have to say, would be awfully clever of her. I wouldn’t have expected it.”

Katara stares daggers out into the garden, keeping her back to the room.

For a moment, there is silence, presumably as Zuko fumes, before he speaks.

“You said,” he snarls, “’I can’t tell which side Dad burnt and which one is just your face.’”

That grabs Katara’s attention despite her best efforts. She glances back over her shoulder at Zuko—at the scar on his face—and away again, but not before Azula notices.

“Does your little wife not know that story?” the princess purrs. “You probably ought to tell her—I hate to break it to you, but you still have a scar for a face. She probably has questions.”

“Get out, Azula,” Zuko snaps.

“I’ll leave when it suits me. I have a message for you, first: you and the water girl are to make yourselves presentable and come before the Fire Lord immediately. End message. I don’t know what Dad wants, but I’ll warn you: I don’t think it’s congratulations.”

“ _Out_ ,” Zuko repeats through his teeth. Katara doesn't even have to turn around to know she's smiling her perfect painted smile, gloating with her eyes.

“Right. See you later, Zuzu,” she says, and she turns on her heel and sweeps out the door.

She’s not their last royal visitor. While Zuko is away in the bathroom—once they’ve finally cleaned it—having the last remnants of monster scrubbed out of him, and while Katara is being cinched into an ornate red and gold Fire Nation hanfu by her attendant, whose name, she’d asked to be reminded, is Biyu, there comes a soft knock at the door.

Biyu motions for another woman—barely more than a girl—to get it. When she opens it on the other side, in her royal robes with her sad eyes, is the Fire Queen. Everyone in the room but Katara bows. Queen Ursa fixes her gaze directly on Katara, but it’s not angry or expectant. Zuko, Katara can’t help but think, has her eyes, sad and golden.

“Princess Katara,” she says, stepping inside and closing the door behind her, “I was wondering if I could have a word.”

 _I’m not a princess,_ she wants to say—but that’s not true anymore. According to the Fire Nation, she’s their princess now. Still, she has to battle the urge to protest, and she can’t speak for a moment, only nod.

Ursa steps further into the room and motions for the open wall to the garden.

“May we step outside?”

Katara nods again, and steps after her. The whispering servants stay inside.

She shadows the queen for a lap around the garden, weaving between bushes and bursts of flowers on a flagstone path that brings them to the far side of the little pond. There’s a stone bench there, legs crawling with ivy, which Ursa seats herself on and motions for Katara to join her.

“Katara,” she says softly. She has the saddest voice Katara has ever heard, resonant but gentle and tired. “I came as soon as I heard about Zuko. There’s a story I’d like to tell you. I didn’t think it would be relevant before, but if it’s true what Azula told us, then I’d be remiss not saying something to you.”

“Ok,” Katara says lamely, trying to get a feel for what this woman’s ulterior motives might be but sensing nothing. She reminds her of someone, somehow, and she won’t let herself think of who. About her sharp chin shaped just like her own mother’s, about the threads of gray in dark hair that Kya never got to have. “I mean—”

Ursa smiles. It’s crooked, like Zuko’s, without any teeth.

“I understand. You don’t know me. You don’t trust me. But I need you to try, please. Just for this.”

Katara struggles to keep her expression neutral--she isn't sure which is more dangerous, to agree, or call the queen a liar. All her efforts fall apart with Ursa's next sentence, anyway.

“I didn’t want to be a part of this family, either,” Ursa says, voice dropping to a whisper. “I wasn’t given a choice any more than you were. Fire Lord Azulon’s people found me and I was instructed that I would be marrying Ozai, I wasn’t asked. I was told it would be ‘best for my family,’ and didn’t need them to tell me what that meant. I imagine you understand.”

Katara stammers for a moment, trying to make sense of that. “But why wouldn’t you have wanted to?” she finally blurts. _You’re Fire Nation._ Surely, no Fire Nation girl could dream of anything else. All these people value is taking what isn't theirs.

Ursa’s pretty face darkens.

“Not everyone loves the war,” she mutters. “I grew up in a small village. We were peaceful people. When soldiers came to ‘recruit’ our firebenders we saw it for what it was: taking our children away to fight and die, and for what? We had all we wanted already. Besides, in my family in particular, we’ve always valued harmony above all else, except maybe love. So I had no desire to be a part of the royal family—even before I met Ozai and understood what he was.”

She looks Katara hard in the eye.

“My husband is an evil man, Katara,” she whispers. Katara clenches her jaw to keep it from dropping again—what this woman is saying to her is surely treason. “He’s rotten in his soul and corrupts everything he touches. All he cares about—from me, to his children—is power. And he made that clear to me when we were to be married. So, I made a choice.”

Katara has to swallow twice to get past her own stunned silence.

“What did you do?”

“My mother,” she’s speaking so softly now Katara can barely hear her, and has to lean in close. She smells heavily of incense. “My mother was an expert herbalist. She taught me and other girls in our village things about different plants and teas no man was ever privy to know, that many women don’t know, especially not high-class capital city girls or their husbands and doctors. Things like which plants will keep a woman from ever becoming pregnant without any sign something might be wrong. But I knew this. And I swore, when I knew what Ozai was, that I would never have his children. It was the only revenge I could take: his line would end with me."

She closes her eyes, and breathes her next words like they're burning her throat.

“It was the worst mistake I ever made.”

“It didn’t work?” Katara asks, Ursa shakes her head.

“No, it worked perfectly. For months upon months. Ozai had doctors brought from every corner of the archipelago, from the colonies . . . I was put on diets, given medicines—he tried everything. But I was lucky, or so I thought. No one ever thought twice about my peasant tea from home I always insisted on.”

The corner of her mouth quirks into an ugly little smile.

“People like this family will always look down on you, Katara,” she says ruefully, “but it also means that they will always underestimate you. You can get away with far more than you think.”

Katara shakes her head. Surely this woman cannot really know what it is to be a good and normal person before being sucked into the royals. Ozai considered her good enough to marry for _some_ reason, surely. But she doesn't argue. She fears the forthcoming information she might lose if she does. What she'll do with anything Ursa has to say, she doesn't know, but it seems stupid not to try and know it.

“But then what happened?” Katara presses. Ursa’s smile disappears again.

“We received a message,” she says, voice receding almost to nothing, like the tide going out, “from a stranger saying she had wisdom to share of an old crone. It said that ‘there are few fruits which grow in the poles, but there is one that grows in the ground.’ She said to get a seed from this plant and water it with blood for one hundred days, then pull it from the ground and eat it. Have you heard of such a thing in your home?”

“Yes!” Katara says, too loudly. “I mean, not exactly but, I think I know the plants you’re talking about I guess they could be considered fruit. Onions came to the Water Tribe from the Earth Kingdom when they first started training hundreds and hundreds of years ago, because they stay down in the soil, they can stay warm enough, if you plant them in a pot, to grow. There some of the only fruits we have. But no one uses blood to water them—it’s said blood is the one part of an animal you can’t use, that it’s only good for curses. If you even believe in that. I always thought it was just something elders said to make sure we washed our hands when cleaning meat and treating wounds.”

Ursa lowers her head into her hand for a moment. Her shoulders shake. For the first time--one delusional moment of sympathy for Zuko aside, anyway--since arriving in the Fire Nation, Katara’s heart moves for someone else. She places a hand gingerly on the Queen’s shoulder.

“Then this never would have happened if we’d taken wisdom from other nations instead of prisoners,” Ursa says when she raises her head. There’s a dampness around her golden eyes. “That’s fitting, somehow . . . but I digress.” She clears her throat, collecting herself. “The point is that Ozai was beyond reason, and so he had someone—I don’t know who, and I don’t know how, and I don’t want to—bring seeds from the Water Tribe, and had them raised on water mixed with blood. At the end of one hundred days, he had them brought to me for dinner. The royal gardens had managed to grow two. He made me eat both. Raw.”

Katara makes a face, and Ursa smiles just a little.

“I take it that’s not how they’re usually prepared?”

“No, definitely not. You’re supposed to take off the skin and then cook them. And even then they're used more for flavoring."

“Well, that’s not what we did. The instructions didn’t say how to prepare them. Pressed by the cook, Ozai’s compromise was that, since we had an extra, I would eat one raw but peeled, and one whole.”

“With the skin on it!?”

Ursa nods.

“I can’t say I recommend it—I imagine it’s like eating paper. I don’t know how I got it down. But I did. And that month, I didn’t bleed.”

“You mean it worked? Eating onions made you _pregnant?_ ”

“Well. Ozai made me pregnant,” she says bitterly, “but yes. My tea didn’t work that month. Or the next. And I carried twins to term. But then, when they were born—”

“One was cursed.”

“I think they both were,” Ursa says sorrowfully. “Azula is beautiful on the outside but just like her father, if not worse, on the inside. Zuko . . . you’ve seen what happened to Zuko. But Katara, here is my warning to you: when I was pregnant with those children, I realized that I would never love anything more with my whole heart. Never. And when Zuko was born his father wanted him dead but I—I convinced him otherwise. Almost too late. I couldn’t stand to lose my baby, even . . .”

“Even though he was . . . ?”

Ursa reaches out and grasps both of Katara’s hands so tightly she crushes her fingers.

“Absolutely. Katara, I am telling you this so you will understand how serious I am when I say that the love of a mother is the most powerful thing in the universe. No matter how much hate you may have for your circumstances, for Zuko, if you have children, none of that will be their fault and you _will_ love them. More than your own life. More than anything.”

“But—”

“But nothing _._ Please, listen to me. Promise . . . if not me, promise yourself: whatever you feel you need to do in this marriage, if there are to be children, _don’t involve them._ Don’t gamble on them, even before they exist. If something happened to them because of your choices—I can’t—there are no words, Katara, for that kind of remorse. Not in any language from any nation. And once you’ve wronged your children, nothing you do will ever feel like enough. It will eat you alive every day that you exist. Even,” she smiles just a little, and it’s the saddest expression Katara has ever seen, “if things seem like they should be fixed.”

Katara looks off into the pond.

She doesn’t want to think about this.

“What if I don’t want to have his children, though?”

“Then tell him as much.”

Katara looks back to her without trying to hide her skepticism and withdraws her hands from Ursa’s.

“As if a Fire Nation prince wouldn’t just take what he wants.”

Ursa squeezes her hands.

“I didn’t get to raise Zuko myself,” she says, “but I know who did, and he was raised too well to ever do such a thing to a woman. I promise you, on my life, that you can sleep beside him every night for the rest of your life and he will never touch you if that isn’t what you want.”

Katara narrows her eyes.

“Then why warn me about gambling on my children?”

“Because I have no way of knowing if you’ll believe me when I say that, or of knowing what this marriage will be like for you. And I’ve already ruined my own children’s lives. I couldn’t stand there being even a chance that my silence would ruin my son’s, too.”

Her son’s. It’s baffling to Katara how this woman can love Zuko so much. By all rights, his being banished, she shouldn’t even know him.

She wonders what other secrets the Fire Queen may be keeping.

“Does Zuko know that story?” she asks instead. Ursa’s face falls.

“He doesn’t know about the contraceptive. No one knows that except for me, and now you. I never had the opportunity to tell him where no one else could find out. Someday, when Ozai is gone—maybe it’s selfish, but that was always my plan. At least then he wouldn’t hate me until then.”

“If he should hate anyone, it should be his father,” Katara consoles her, reaching out again and awkwardly patting the back of Ursa’s long hands. They betray her age—stress beyond her years---with papery skin and veins that stand out beneath it.

“And yet he doesn’t,” she says, closing her eyes. A tear gathers on her lashes. “That I think you’ll see soon enough.”

Then all at once, the queen straightens up and seems to shake herself out.

“Well,” she says. “There it is. I’ve said it all. Now we’d better get you back inside before someone starts to wonder where you are.”

Ursa stands quickly, wiping at her eyes with the enormous sleeves of the royal robes.

“Princess Katara,” she says, extending a hand to help Katara up from the bench, “I don’t suppose you would mind reintroducing me to my son?”

“I, but—” Katara sighs. The moment is gone, and for all she knows, it’s for a reason. Ursa seems like someone who has practice being watched. She takes her hand and stands as well.

“I’ll do my best,” she says. “I’ll admit I barely know him.”

“You’ll get there,” Ursa says, smiling once more, and they make their way back inside.


	3. The Promise

Zuko

____________________

The first morning, there is no dignity in being human. Zuko has to sit at the edge of the bathtub while he struggles to dress himself, attendants waiting to jump in and help him. The robes are easy in that they slip over his head, but pants are terrible. He manages to get his knees bent, his ankles twisted, but he can’t get his feet off the ground—the _lifting_ evades him. All his life he’s wondered what it would be like to run or jump and now that he has a body that’s capable of anything other than dragging itself around it won’t cooperate with him. At least not at the hip, or wherever it is that the steadiness comes from in standing. By the time he’s ready to leave the bathroom someone has brought in a chair on handles like a palanquin, and he’s not sure if that’s somehow worse than being hauled around under his armpits. The chair feels more permanent somehow, like he might be trapped in it forever if he sits down once. But he’s not about to try and explain any of that, and accepts the chair.

When they bring him out his mother is seated across from Katara at the table near the door. Someone has brought a platter of steaming buns for them to snack on. She looks up when they carry him in and her hands fly to her face, covering her mouth. She clambers to her feet, as ungraceful as he’s ever seen her—in the brief window he’s been in the capital to see her, that is—and rushes over to him. Without waiting for his attendants to even set the chair down, she throws her arms around him. She's warm, if not quite as warm as Katara's bare arm around him had been this morning. He can't get the feeling of that out of his head.

“Zuko,” his mother says, voice watery, “I’m so happy for you.”

Haltingly, still distrusting of his own muscles, for the first time in his life, Zuko wraps his arms around someone. He isn't sure what to do with his fingers, if he should seek to grip her clothes or just splay them across her back. He does the latter, filling up his palms with the texture of her robes. It’s hard to let go when she pulls away in a way he can’t be certain comes from the awkwardness of his limbs.

“I’m still figuring it out,” he says. She smiles at him with the smallest uptick of the corners of her mouth.

“I’m sure it will come with time. No child in history has ever learned to walk in a day.”

He feels that strange tingling in his face again, whatever the sensation is must be apparent on his face because his mother smiles broadly all of the sudden in a way that makes her want to cover her mouth with her hand— _is she laughing?_

Zuko tries with every muscle in his face he’s aware of not to scowl—he thinks, having had not more than a minute to himself while he was supposed to be bathing with a hand mirror to try to understand his own face, that he might be prone to scowling.

“I’m sorry,” his mother says, revealing her smile again, this time with a few teeth. It’s stiff, he thinks, as if underused. Nothing like Uncle’s. “The look on your _face_ was so . . . well. I’m sure you’ll catch on quickly, you always do.”

As soon as she says it her eyes grow wider and her smile disappears. She glances around—no one seems to be listening. His attendants have backed away to offer them some discreet distance and are discussing something among themselves that their hand gestures indicate has something to do with how they’re carrying the chair, clearly unaware of Zuko’s conversation given that they haven’t realized it’s paused. If they had, they’d be standing at the ready, silent and waiting—he thinks. There were no servants where he grew up, but he’s learned since he’s been here. If it weren’t so convenient, the lack of deference might even bother him, not so much because he wants people standing around hanging on his every words but because he knows his father or sister would never receive the same treatment. As it is, their distraction is a blessing.

The one person he can’t account for is Katara.

He leans around his mother to look at her, but she’s not doing anything but nibbling at one of the buns, nothing in her posture to indicate whether she’d heard or even listened. If anything she seems to be too focused on the wall across from her, at not looking at him. He distrusts that immediately--but there's nothing to be done, either.

 _Who would she tell, anyway?_ He consoles himself, and looks back to his mother. She clears her throat.

“Are you comfortable in the meantime?” she asks, gesturing to his chair. He looks down at the arm of it, closing his fingers against the fabric. He’s never been able to feel the bit of crunch that velvet has before this.

“I think so.” Most of him still feels like bruises waiting to emerge.

“Good, good . . . would you like breakfast?”

“I’m not sure I have time. Azula was here: father wants to see me.”

His mother’s mouth turns into a hard line.

“He can wait for your breakfast,” she says stiffly. “Please, I insist.”

She turns and bends over the table, plucking a bun from the platter with her fingers, and drops it into a hand he only just opens in time. It’s hot against his palm, not quite sticky but sort of moist. He almost asks her about chopsticks, which Katara is visibly using, but thinks better of it. He’s only so used to having fingers--perhaps it's better not to attempt utensils, yet.

He's not sure about attempting eating at all. He isn’t sure how he’s supposed to eat properly with a mouthful of flat human teeth, just that it’s imperative he somehow keep his lips closed while he do it. His attempts at it are awkward, his teeth insufficient to tear off the size of bites he wants, the grinding of molars unfamiliar and uncoordinated. He eats mostly behind his own hand and doesn’t get much enjoyment from it, just burns his own tongue, though he suspects maybe he pallet is more refined than it used to be—even past the heat the bun, apparently full of red bean paste, is the most flavorful non-meat item he’s ever tasted. Zuko realizes as he’s eating it that he’s starving, but he declines to eat more than one. There are too many eyes on him and his uncooperative mouth.

His mother, too, seems to have reservations against eating: she pulls only small, halfhearted morsels of dough from a single bun with her chopsticks without ever even breaking into the food’s red center. Only Katara eats freely. He’d noticed she wasn’t shy about food at dinner the night before, either. A pang of envy sours his stomach: she does everything so naturally, so artlessly. Eating. Walking. Beating his skin off.

He watches her eat without realizing he’s doing it, taking in the way she looks now that her attendants have had the chance to tame her hair into as close to a Fire Nation style as her course waves will allow and dress her in something fresh. He thinks he liked her better in her native clothing: the red in her dress doesn’t suit her warm skin, not enough contrast, or her brilliant eyes. The gold in the trim is nice, though. He follows the ribbons of it at her waist, across her chest, around her neck for a while, the spell broken only by a subtle glare she sends in his direction when she notices his eyes on her. If she means to leave him with the impression that she’d rather he never look at her at all, she’s doing a good job of it.

A tightness in his mouth suggests to Zuko that he may be scowling again. Having real facial expressions feels like a kind of treachery by his own body: he feels naked, like his every thought is on display in his face. Maybe he should just pick one expression and try to hold it forever—preferably soon.

Before his father sees him.

He grits his teeth against the thought, swallowing a lump in his throat at the same time.

“We should go soon,” he says to Katara. She sets down her chopsticks.

“If you say so,” she says, and rises to her feet. Across the table from her his mother closes her eyes tightly for the length of a heartbeat and then follows suit.

“I’ll walk with you as far as the throne room,” she says. “I haven’t been invited to whatever he has to say.”

Zuko has learned since arriving here that his mother usually isn’t included in his father’s councils. No more than he is. But Katara looks perplexed.

“What is the role of the queen in the Fire Nation, may I ask?” she says, looking to Zuko and his mother and back. His mother’s jaw flexes.

“That depends entirely on the Fire Lord. His word is the law of the land, above all other authority. Whether his wife acts as one of his council or just the head of his home is up to him. Fire Lord Ozai prefers to rule alone.”

“Oh,” Katara says. She holds his mother’s eyes for a long moment Zuko can’t interpret before turning a much icier gaze on him.

“Why does your father want to see me, do you think?” she demands.

“Because however this change impacts Zuko’s birthright,” his mother offers, opening a hand toward him, in his chair with his new body, “will determine your future as well. You’re a set, now.”

If the queen weren’t present, Zuko imagines Katara might say something snide about that: she has that purse-lipped look like she’s holding something inside her mouth.

“We’d better go,” Zuko says, ignoring her. A glance over his shoulder brings his attendants to the ready. They pick up his chair and with his furious little wife walking on one side of him and his tall, sad0eyed mother on the other, they make their way toward the throne room.

* * *

Zuko doesn’t have to be able to see his father’s face, dancing in and out of the shadow of the flames around him, to know that he’s sneering. Uncle never tried to protect him from his father's anger, even when he was outside of its reach--as much as he's ever been outside its reach. As if his face didn't ache when he moved wrong, the skin too stiff, as if he didn't have to strain his left eye to see. He's always known what his father is. It's never been about seeing him as anything else: just about being seen.

“What is this?” the Fire Lord demands, opening a hand toward Zuko before his attendants have even set him down. He tightens his jaw and adheres to the rules of deference his uncle taught him, bowing his head since he can’t bow his body. Katara, thankfully, does as he’d instructed her in the hallway outside and kneels beside him.

“I am unaccustomed to my legs as of yet,” he answers when he raises his head.

“So you’ve shed your monster’s skin after twenty two years only to come before me an invalid. I shouldn’t have expected any less.”

Zuko grinds his teeth. _Do not interrupt him do not interrupt him do not interrupt him,_ he repeats to himself, trying to remember all of the royal court advice he’s ever received, grasping for his uncle’s voice in his mind. He keeps his jaw clenched until he’s invited to speak with a hissed “ _well?”_

“I’ll learn,” he says with a momentous effort not to speak from between his teeth. This is an opportunity. He cannot waste it. “I expect this will last a matter of days, no more.”

Though he doesn’t dare look away from his father, he can feel Katara’s eyes on him, questioning the lie. _Not a lie. A promise._

“ _Days,_ ” the Fire Lord rumbles, “is too long. What else can you not do? What other insult to my line do you insist on bringing before me? Tell me, Prince Zuko, can you firebend? You’re missing the spark in your eye.”

 _They called me the Dragon Prince,_ he thinks, and opens his mouth to unleash a bellow of flame to break through even his father’s wall of it, let Ozai see who he really is. The kind of son he fathered.

But nothing comes.

No heat rises in his chest, and he tastes only air on his tongue.

Zuko's face tingles again and he finally understands that it must be the sensation of the blood draining away because, with a horrible weight in his stomach the only thing tethering him to the Earth, he feels suddenly like a ghost. Like a shadow of himself. He snaps his jaw shut and wills the flames to rise in his chest, maybe overflow from his nose, but again, nothing comes. Like there is no energy in his body but the barest trickle just keeping him alive for him to call on, and he doesn’t have the strength to order it into flames, even a moment of them. Even if it's the energy that's supposed to keep him breathing.

“My bending will return,” he croaks, trying to force belief into the lie even as his very sense of self spirals away from him.

The Fire Lord surges to his feet.

“You came before me and demanded a birthright that if you’d had any honor you would have forsaken. Your duty to your family was to die unmarked and yet you came. And I was kind to you. I found you your whore,” beside him he can hear Katara’s sharp intake of breath, maybe he should have warned her that now the wedding was secure the niceties would be over, but even he hadn’t expected his father to express his well-known opinions that frankly. Something lurches in his gut and he has to dig his fingers into the arms of his chair to resist the urge to reach out for Katara. But he doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He's just trying to stay upright, to keep from shouting in hopes that fire will spring from his lips. That was the one good thing. The one good thing he ever had.

He can't have lost it with a _curse._

“And now through some peasant witchcraft you come to me like this,” his father continues. “Were you expecting me to be pleased? What reward did you expect for achieving only now what might have saved you as an infant? Tell me.”

How he's keeping his composure when he feels a thousand miles outside himself--like he has very possibly died and crossed into the spirit world--he doesn't know.

“Only your recognition as your son, my Lord,” Zuko says. “That is all I have ever asked.”

The flames surrounding the Fire Lord surge.

“The only recognition you will ever receive from me is sitting beside you,” he snarls, “take her and get back where you came from.”

That’s so close to a dismissal. If Zuko had any sense he’d accept it as one and let his attendants take him out, they’re already moving for his chair. But he can’t. The space between those words and his father actually telling him to get out is a narrow window in his mind growing smaller and darker and he knows once it closes there will be nothing else. Like his entire life up until now, there will be nothing else.

He can't even firebend.

There has to be _something_ else.

“What can I do?” he exclaims. “What can I do to restore myself to you? Name it. Any task, any prize, I will bring it to you.”

For a moment there is terrible silence.

“You,” his father finally says, “would bring me what I don’t have? What can you give me? Ba Sing Se, that your dear uncle failed to bring to its knees? The location of the Northern Water Tribe? Name me something I do not have it’s within your grasp to bring me.”

He has only a moment to think, he knows. Zuko runs through a hundred years of Fire Nation history in his head, searching for what isn’t there—what’s missing from the power that rules the world—and he lands on, of all things, the fairy story his uncle likes so much, and he blurts:

“I will find you the Avatar.”


	4. A Sea Journey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for how long this took given that it isn't an action packed chapter, but I've been doing battle with a (not-COVID) illness all week, and this is what I had in me. Huge thank you to everyone who's been interacting with this story in the meantime, especially all your wonderful comments, only three chapters worth and already you guys have given me so many ideas!!!

Katara

_______________________

“What were you thinking?” Katara demands as soon as the door to the throne room closes behind them. Ursa, who had been waiting for them in the hall, closes her eyes and sighs. Zuko doesn’t seem to notice.

“We’ll talk about this later,” he says.

“Later? Later when? While we’re packing our bags?” Katara retorts, hands closing to fists at her sides.

“More or less,” Zuko replies with his nose in the air. The look of determination on his face might almost be comical—it’s just so _irrational—_ if her lifestyle weren’t attached to his ludicrous choices. He doesn’t look at all like a man who’s just thrown his life away to chase the impossible—he looks every inch the gratified prince, in his chair with his servants, with his hair half pulled back into a tight top-knot with its bold red binding. He matches the rest of the royals, now. It’s revolting. Even more so because the look suits his long jaw and high cheekbones.

“The Avatar is—” Katara protests, and a gasp from Ursa cuts her off.

“The _Avatar?”_ The queen asks, aghast, dismay coloring her expression.

“I told my father I’d find them,” Zuko says frankly. He doesn’t look at her.

“How?” She implores. Katara ventures a weirdly tainted moment of thankfulness: at least one person in this mess she’s found herself in is sane.

“He’s promised me a ship,” Zuko says plainly, as if a ship were the only logistical concern in finding what can’t be found.

Ursa stops in her tracks. Zuko holds up his hand so that the men carrying his chair stop, too.

“You’re leaving,” she says, and the sheer heartbreak in her voice is so potent that Katara has to glance away. She can’t watch this woman, a mother, whatever else she may be, losing her child.

A glance at Zuko, instead, says this at least he feels some guilt about. His expression softens and his eyes sadden and he says, quietly:

“He wasn’t going to let me stay anyway.”

They look at each other for a moment that seems it should last forever, but is interrupted by someone stepping through the throne room doors behind them and approaching quickly. Everyone but Zuko’s servants watch the man approach. He bows a little to the prince, queen, _and Katara,_ before turning to Ursa.

“My lady,” he says, “the Fire Lord has asked for your presence.”

Ursa inhales deeply, and nods. The man scuttles off. Katara wonders if the queen isn’t about to be berated for her son’s actions, or if it’s something entirely unrelated.

Breaking his reserve at last, Zuko reaches out and grasps at his mother’s folded hands.

“I’ll write,” he promises. “One way or another.”

Ursa weaves her fingers through his. He has her same long hands, pretty and feminine, and it’s like watching Ursa grasp for a younger version of herself. Maybe who she was before she came here.

“You’re going immediately,” she says sorrowfully.

“I’m to be out of the palace by tonight.”

Ursa closes her eyes again, tightly, but if she has anything to say it can’t be said, because she remains silent. After a beat she leans in and hugs the prince, wrapping her arms tightly around his broad shoulders. Katara glances away from the intimacy of his arms coming up to hold her back. But she thinks she can make out the faintest shape of a whisper in Ursa’s voice, directed into his ear, before she pulls away and turns back down the hall. Zuko waits for her back to disappear through the heavy doors to the throne room before he motions for he servants to carry him forward. Katara steps back in beside him, her dress sweeping the floor around her feet. It’s a strange sensation to feel so . . . ornate.

“Even your mother thinks this is ridiculous,” Katara says darkly as they move away from the throne room.

“It’s what the Fire Lord wants,” Zuko retorts. His tone is flat and hard. Katara breathes in deeply, a thousand retorts on the tip of her tongue, but she thinks better of all of them, at least for the moment. As if sensing the weight of her silence—or maybe it’s just the look on her face—Zuko looks at her and quirks his existing eyebrow.

“You’re right,” she says, immediately loathing her word choice, though she knows that’s getting to the point of pettiness, “we’ll talk about this later.”

They walk in silence all the back to their bedroom. No one says a word as Zuko grapples with climbing from the chair into bed—it’s the most elevated position available for someone who can’t just stand, Katara thinks. It makes sense why he’d opt for it. In her mind, though, seeing him in bed in broad daylight fully dressed reinforces the idea his father had stated: he’s a kind of invalid. Normally, she likes caring for people. The fact that he’s _her_ invalid, though, rankles her, and she almost hates to see his servants go.

Zuko drops his head back against the headboard and sighs. Katara takes up her station from this morning, leaning against the back wall, eyes on the garden.

“Ok,” says Zuko’s voice behind her, “let’s talk.”

Katara pivots so she’s facing him, the sun and open air to her back.

“Right: This is insane. You’re insane.”

“How so?”

“The Avatar hasn’t been seen in a hundred years. Your army managed to kill them for good with the Air Nomads, everyone knows that.”

“Is that what they say in the south? Because it’s news to me,” he says.

“It’s the only explanation for how someone who’s supposed to bring balance could let things get like _this,_ ” she retorts, making her disgust as apparent as possible.

“I assume by ‘this’ you mean your issue with Fire Nation expansion.”

“Imperialism. The word you’re looking for is imperialism. Unwelcome, unasked for, oppressive, dirty—”

“I get it,” he says, cutting her off. She bristles. How dare he.

“Do you? Do you really?” she snaps. His good eye widens a little—apparently that isn’t the challenge he expected. It isn’t even what she expected: asking this feels, to Katara, like she’s inviting in a possibility that she shouldn’t, that she’s allowing room in her heart for him for the idea that maybe he genuinely doesn’t know. Doesn’t understand. That his entire world has been restricted to exile and whatever propaganda whoever had the miserable task of raising his scaly, spoiled—

She doesn’t even know who that was.

There’s a lot about him that she doesn’t know.

“Have you ever been to a Fire Nation colony?” she asks. “Or any village in the Earth Kingdom? Or the Water Tribe? In your life?” she asks, actually curious now.

“No,” he says after a beat of pursing his lips.

“Then you know nothing,” she spits.

“And you’re here to teach me?” he asks, slightly incredulous in the most insulting possible way.

“No, that would require you to listen,” she snaps back. “And I doubt you’re capable of that.”

“Why?” he sputters, an angry edge seeping into his voice. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Katara allows herself to conveniently forget the fact that she’s just had exactly that thought by retorting “because you’re Fire Nation,” and crossing her arms across her chest. Zuko mirrors her, good eye narrowing, expression going hard. He’s a remarkably stern looking person when he’s serious, it’s almost at odds with how pretty—not that she lets herself dwell on that—he can be from some angles, with his fine bones and bright eyes smooth skin, too-pale though it is.

“You seem to have a lot of ideas about what that means,” he says, scowling. He does that a lot.

“I know _exactly_ what that means. Better than you do, apparently.”

“Are you sure you meant to kill me?” he retorts. “Are you sure your entire purpose here isn’t to irritate me?”

“It’s the least I can do,” she says, and sticks her nose in the air. “If you don’t like it, divorce me. Do you have that in the Fire Nation?”

Zuko laughs, not the nice laugh of someone who knows anything about joy, but the rusty bitter kind of deep irony.

“There is exactly one person who can annul a royal marriage,” he says snidely, “and _nothing_ would make him happier than to let us make each other miserable.”

Katara grimaces.

“The Fire Lord?” she asks.

“The Fire Lord,” he says.

“What if I just left, then? What if when your ship makes port in wherever it is you want to start your wild badger-goose chase I just walk away?”

“You’d spend the rest of your life hiding from the Fire Nation. You couldn’t go home. Leaving a royal marriage is tantamount to adultery.”

Katara snarls.

“Seriously?” she seethes. “Ug. And let me guess: adultery is treason.”

“Good guess,” he says, and she despises how smug he is.

“Is that what keeps your poor mother around?” she spits.

That kills his smugness. For the first time since he lost the giant teeth, he’s frightening to her: The cold mask of fury that takes over his face indicates a capacity for the kind of anger that can hurt and destroy. It’s an anger with deep roots, like the magma of the Earth, slow and hot and deadly if it should break the surface.

“ _Do not_ talk about my mother,” he hisses, and for once, Katara doesn’t argue with him.

Silence reigns for what must be several minutes, Katara looking over her shoulder at the garden, Zuko staring into space ahead of him. Finally he says:

“I’m not surprised the rumors say the Avatar is dead. If that’s what the rest of the world thinks, all the better for us. But there is no record of the Avatar dying in the battles with the Air Nomads, so two possibilities exist: either they’re hiding out somewhere—”

“They’d be ancient.”

“Less than 200, and I think the record for an Avatar is greater than that,” he says, shrugging, and she wonders who in his life bothered to make him an expert on such a thing. “So, either the same Avatar has been lying low for a hundred years, or they’ve been reborn. If that’s the case, we may already have them and not know it.”

“Because you’ve captured every bender in the Southern Water Tribe?” she spits.

“I was going to say, ‘because there are no benders in the Southern Water Tribe.’” _That’s what you like to think._

“And how do you suppose that got to be?”

He looks her in the eye for just a moment and for that instant she can see uncertainty, but then he shakes his head and the confidence returns to his expression, the hard set of his mouth.

“My point is,” he says, “the Avatar has to be somewhere.”

“Right. Somewhere that no one has found in a hundred years. But that won’t stop _you_ , for some reason? You’re just going to find them no problem.”

“I didn’t say _that_.”

“So you admit it’s going to take, oh, I don’t know . . . _forever?_ How long? Do I get to spend the rest of my life following you around the world for, for . . .” she trails off and Zuko snorts.

“The rest of your life following me around is more or less what you agreed to, yeah,” he says, throwing her a look which is just slightly too reserved to be gloating, but she gets the point. “It might as well be this, don’t you think?”

“Oh. You. Just,” she sputters, throwing her hands down at her sides and closing her fists before she catches herself, momentarily mortified that he’s gotten a reaction out of her like something she’d direct at her brother. It’s simultaneously not anger enough, and too much, like he doesn’t deserve this much of her emotion. She clamps her mouth shut and closes her eyes, inhales deeply through her nose and releases it the same way.

When she can think again, she sweeps around the bed toward the bathroom without looking at him.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“To take a bath, or something,” she retorts as she marches out of the room. She can’t think of anything better to say, or anywhere else she has that she can go.

* * *

Katara’s second night as a married woman sees her facing down a single bed far smaller than the luxury of royal quarters in the cramped, windowless metal hell of a Fire Navy ship. What the Fire Lord has allowed his wayward son is no royal liner, it’s not even a large ship in naval terms, from what Katara understands. Fire Navy shipbuilding is nothing like what she carries knowledge of from home, with their coal-fed furnaces and oppressive, gas-lit close hallways, everything cast in red by the flames even though the metal of their ships to be the one thing the Fire Nation doesn’t bother to paint that color to begin with. The only thing that makes this bearable is the thought repeating in her mind: _I’m going home._

It’s temporary, but it’s something.

Zuko had been easier to convince than she’d expected—too much so, really. Her rationale had been that only the Southern Water Tribe could confirm that the Avatar had not, in fact, secretly been born into the Southern Water Tribe. She probably didn’t need to add “besides, my family will want to see with their own eyes that I survived my wedding night without getting eaten,” which had drained what little color Zuko had to begin with from his face, turning his lips pale as a corpse and his scar so red by comparison to the rest of his cheek that it looked like his face was on fire. But he’d agreed, and she’s going home.

There is no room for the niceties of palanquin chairs in the narrow halls of a ship. Getting Zuko to their room has required her to walk with him every step of the way, his arm over her shoulders, his weight pulling on her, as he crammed one awkward leg into a support position at a time.

She doesn’t drop him particularly gracefully into the bed they’re doomed to share. The bob and lilt of the deck on the current throws his fragile balance as she releases him, though, and in the next instant he’s on the floor, breathing deeply through his nose with his eyes closed, clearly fuming. Katara can sympathize: she’s no happier about having to drag him back off the floor than he looks about being there in the first place.

She sighs, and bends to grasp his arm and draw it back over her shoulders. She despises the feeling of it there, hard muscle across the back of her neck, weighing down on her hair—as soon as she’s dealt with him, she’s putting it back somehow, not this wild Fire Nation half-down fashion not made for her thick waves, which stick to her neck in the humidity of the waterfront. But the worst if it is how his fingers find her hand, looking for something to anchor his grasp to, his powerful grip just careful enough not to crush her fingers. She almost wishes that he would. She hates the politeness, all his chagrin at being hauled around, at making her caretake him.

Katara hoists him back to his feet and shoves him farther back on the bed this time, mostly by leaning in against him and pushing him bodily across the sheets. The effort forces her to pivot, almost like she’s turned into his chest on purpose. She strains her neck trying to keep her cheek from bumping up against his shoulder. But then her foot slips, and she falls in against him anyway, knocking him onto his back sideways on the bed while she comes down flat on top of him, her chin dug into his chest.

Both of them grunt, losing a little air to the force of their bodies falling together. The noise comes low and rugged from Zuko and for a horrible second Katara is caught in the sound and the way it combines with the smell of him, something just like clothes and skin but somehow distinctly, horribly masculine, the proximity, the little window of his skin revealed by the crisscrossing of his collar that is now right under her nose. Her left arm is still under him.

She yanks away as ungracefully and forcefully as she’s capable of, smacking Zuko in the chest as she goes. He grunt again and grimaces, but she’s away from him now and the moment is over and it doesn’t turn her stomach this time.

Zuko drags himself upright so he’s sitting in bed, glaring at her.

“Were you serious when you told your father it would be a matter of days before you were walking?” she asks, stepping back from the bed.

“If I wasn’t before I am now,” he grumbles.

“Good,” she says.

He stares at her.

“What?” she snaps.

“Just waiting to see if I really need to tell you the conditions that’s probably going to require,” he says, eyeing her with a little wrinkle in his nose like whatever it is he’s thinking is slightly off-putting. She stares at him with her flattest and least-impressed look, refusing to budge. She can guess where he’s going with this, but she refuses to volunteer it. Finally, Zuko sighs.

“I’m probably going to need your help,” he says.

“You can’t get one of your soldiers to do that?”

The corner of his mouth flicks into an ugly smile.

“My father’s good graces didn’t extend to a full-service luxury cruise, I’m sure you’ve noticed. Sailors aren’t attendants. They have more important things to do than dragging me around.”

 _Maybe I do, too,_ she wants to retort, but the problem is that she really doesn’t. They’re trapped on this ship together, both of them with the nothing-to-do of passengers for the three-day journey to the Southern Water Tribe. At least home will be expecting them at the end of this: she’d sent a messenger hawk ahead, with some help from Biyu, to the tribe. No one will be excited to see a Fire Nation bird overhead—someone may just shoot it down, which she almost feels bad for since it’s not the bird’s fault who it serves—but it will be better for everyone’s nerves back home to see the bird than for their ship to just suddenly appear on the horizon. Especially since the disaster she currently finds herself in was supposed to promise they’d never see another Fire Navy ship at home again.

Katara exhales heavily through her nose.

“I’ve never helped anyone but a baby learn to walk before,” she says. Zuko’s jaw pops for a second, and then his eyebrow inches up as bewilderment takes over his expression instead.

“You’ve taught babies to walk?” he asks.

“In the Water Tribe the older kids usually take care of the younger during the day so their parents can work, especially the girls.”

He makes a strange noise in his throat and looks askance.

“I’ve never even seen a baby,” he says.

That disarms her for a moment past the point of her constant broiling irritation with him and into genuine curiosity.

“Wait, never? In what, nineteen years? Seriously?”

“Twenty,” he corrects, and she subconsciously adds his age to the short list of things she knows about the man she married, right behind ‘cursed by an onion.’ She supposes she probably knew that already, the Fire Nation ‘coming of age’ at twenty being most of the reason she’s standing where she is, but she hasn’t been making a point of holding on to Fire Nation cultural details.

“How have you _never_ seen a baby in twenty years of being alive?” she presses. It feels almost like she’s accusing him of something, maybe she is.

Zuko makes a face, not quite disgust, not enough energy behind it.

“I grew up in a . . . compound, you might call it, in the middle of nowhere. Just my uncle and the only tutors he could get on his reputation alone, and that was mostly stuffy old men. A few staff. Not exactly a lot of families running around.”

“That’s . . .” she doesn’t know what to say to that. Finally she settles on “No one tracked down some unwitting Earth Kingdom kid to keep you company, or something?”

“Definitely not,” he says darkly. “I’m pretty sure I’m what parents around there told their kids about at night to keep them too scared to wander into the mountains.”

“Don’t wander or the Fire Nation will get you,” Katara says, the words an automatic echo of her own upbringing. Zuko makes the strangest, most complex expression she’s ever seen on him: It takes her a moment to register that the Fire Nation wasn’t what these parents would have been using as the monster in their stories.

“O—oh. Right,” she stutters. He stares at her a beat longer with a kind of blank wonderment.

“Did you just . . . forget?” he asks.

“No, I mean, I—” she pauses, sighs, starts again. What she’s saying feels dangerously close to a real conversation with the enemy, but then again, she is going to spend the rest of her life—or at least the foreseeable future—attached to this man. Maybe every conversation can’t be a battle. She’s already so tired, anyway. With the ocean’s rocking under their feet, that bed looks deeply inviting all of the sudden. Even with him in it. “Actually, I guess I did.”

He stares at her with even his bad eye held wide—or as wide as it will go.

“What?” she asks, crossing her arms.

“You’re . . .” he says, and he seems to be scrambling for words, “wild.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snaps, their moment of peace evaporating. “Are you calling me a savage?”

“What? No, no I just mean—”

“ _What_?”

“Just that you’re wei— _unexpected_ ,” he says, catching himself too late for her not to know he was calling her ‘weird.’ He rushes to add “I didn’t know someone could just forget a thing like that.”

She glares at him for a beat but decides to let it go. She doesn’t have the energy to pick him apart right now. Not over . . . that. whatever that was. He certainly has the people skills of someone who grew up isolated.

Instead of fighting him further, she just shrugs.

“I think you’ve been human around me longer than . . . not,” she says. “Yesterday kind of feels like a dream.”

His mouth opens and immediately snaps shut as he thinks better of whatever he was going to say to that, but his eyes stay wide, roving over her, searching her face. She doesn’t like the scrutiny.

“You’re staring at me,” she says, bristling. He just blinks a few times like she’s woken him from a trance and says:

“You spent your entire night ripping monster skin off of me and _forgot about it_.”

“Yeah, while you slept through it and didn’t help at all,” she retorts. He winces and reaches up to the back of his head.

“I was busy,” he says, “being out cold. This body can’t take much punishment, can it? This is barely healed.”

Now it’s her turn to look at him strangely.

“Barely? As in healed at all?” she says. He shrugs.

“That’s what it feels like,” he says.

She purses her lips and weighs her curiosity against her desire to keep an antagonistic few feet of space between them, and surrenders to the curiosity. She pulls herself into bed beside him so they’re both sitting with their feet hanging over the edge and leans around behind him to look at his head. She has to move his hair—it’s much nicer now than it was the last time she touched it, slick-soft in the way that silk is, and it parts cleanly over the wound she’s looking for. Sure enough, the gash in the back of his head looks older than a day. Not by much, but nonetheless.

“You _heal_ like a bender,” she mutters. She leans away from him again just in time to see his mouth turn to a hard line, face going paler than usual, almost white.

“Did your legend say anything about that?” he asks in a wooden tone.

“Bending?”

He nods, silent and wooden.

“No. It ends with a pile of bones.”

He grunts wordlessly, closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again his expression is cold and distant. It’s hard to look at.

“So,” she says, looking at the opposite wall in their blank, oppressive ship’s quarters, “you lied to your father when you said it would come back, didn’t you?”

He throws her a hard look but doesn’t seem able to muster a denial. Katara shrugs.

“Good for you. He’s an evil person.”

He twists around to stare at her more directly with a mix of alarm and anger in his expression, nothing like the fury with which he’d defended his mother.

“What he is,” Zuko says, “is the most powerful person on the planet. When the Fire Nation leads the rest of the world into a golden age of culture and technology, he’s going to be the person who did it.”

Katara’s jaw drops.

“Is _that_ what you think the Fire Nation is doing?” she asks, genuinely aghast. “What’d those tutors do, feed you propaganda raw on a bed of rice your entire life?”

He glares at her but doesn’t seem to have anything to say just yet. Probably overcome by her wit: she thinks the reference to her limited experience with Fire Nation food was fairly clever. She may be “ _wild,”_ but she learns fast.

“Because _you’re_ completely unbiased,” he finally grunts.

“ _I_ have a right to be,” she spits, but she doesn’t elaborate any further, and he doesn’t ask her to. Maybe he’s tired, too.

She could lay back on this rocky sailor’s bed right now and fall asleep on it sideways, she really could. Even though it’s so narrow she’d probably hit her head on the wall on the other side trying. She glances down at the bed beneath her. Zuko must follow her gaze.

“Tired?” he asks after a moment, the word a bit mumbled.

“Yes.”

“Should I offer to sleep on the floor?” he asks. She glances at him, trying to read his expression, wondering for a moment if maybe he’s trying to make a joke.

“Are you serious?”

He shrugs one shoulder.

“It’s a small bed and you hate me,” he says flatly, staring ahead at the wall. For a moment, she can’t find anything to say back. Not even a nice snide _good, at least you understand that,_ which is what first comes to mind. She fumbles silently over words like a fish gasping for water for so long he finally turns to look at her. His eyebrow furrows.

“You’d sleep on the floor,” she finally says, “this floor.”

“Well, I’d try.”

He says it and she’s reminded of the way she felt when he first smiled, suddenly furious in a directionless way she can’t even turn on him properly, like this must be a trick, or an act, or a pity -play, anything other than the plain _honor_ of it. Of giving up the only available bed to a woman for her comfort. She’s reminded of his mother’s words: _You could sleep beside him every night for the rest of your life._

She opens her mouth to say that sounds like a wonderful idea, and instead what comes out sounds like “that’s not necessary.”

He looks genuinely surprised.

“I’d end up stepping on your neck in the middle of the night and getting executed for treason,” she says quickly. The corner of his mouth ticks up, as if that was funny. In whatever backward semblance of a sense of humor he has, maybe it was.

“Yeah,” he says, “if you’re going to try and kill me again it would be nice if it was at least intentional. There’s a little more dignity in that.”

He says it with such absolute deadpan that she can’t even be certain he’s being sarcastic. She fumbles for a retort.

“Sure,” she finally says, just for something to say.

Zuko’s blank gaze unlocks from the far wall he’s been staring at again, and his hands go to his clothes. He starts wrestling them over his head without hesitation, exposing bare torso. Katara averts her eyes, willing the heat to disperse from her cheeks before he notices. She’s seen him naked at this point, it’s not his body that bothers her, just the lack of shyness. He’s so . . . unaffected about the act of undressing. Like he’s no more vulnerable in his skin than he is in his clothes, the opposite of how she feels.

He’s learning his new body quickly, and he extracts himself without fumbling from the top half of his clothing, he tosses it aside, from what she can see out of the corner of her eye. She hopes he doesn’t expect her to pick it up for him—she doesn’t intend to be that kind of wife.

When she looks at him again he’s staring down the ties on his pants with clear consternation.

“What are you doing?” she blurts.

“Thinking about whether I want to try to get these off or sleep in them,” he says with a grimace.

“I’m not taking them off for you,” she says, more snappish than she even meant to be. Instead of scowling at her he goes a little wide eyed and croaks “No thank you,” without looking at her, and she wishes he would have scowled instead.

They ignore each other for a moment, and he inhales deeply and redirects his attention to his pants again. It takes him a little fumbling, but he gets them untied quickly—it’s impressive, really, how fast he’s adapting to normal, dexterous fingers without talons on the ends. To all of it, really. He has to flop over on his back on the mattress to wrestle his pants off of his legs, but he seems to have figured out how to lift his hips enough to do so, which is more control over his body than he’d had this morning. Katara breathes a silent sigh of relief: maybe by the time they get off of this ship, he’ll be walking, and she’ll at least be able to step back onto the shores of her home without him hanging off of her.

She takes the opportunity while he’s on his back to start stripping her own clothes. She’s nicer to them than he was with his, folding them and setting them aside. She’s not used to fabrics like this, made almost more for beauty than for function, and they are beautiful.

If there are specific clothes for sleeping in the Fire Nation, Biyu hadn’t pointed them out when she was packing her things into a chest for her, so Katara assumes she’s meant to sleep in her underwear, which consists of an unfamiliar combination of shorts made out of a fabric so light and so sheer and so breathable that it’s uncomfortably like wearing nothing at all—the red dye in the fabric is all that keeps them opaque—and a strange device Biya had called a dudou which serves as a bodice but which doesn’t offer much in the way of support, at least not in the way that Katara is used to. To her it doesn’t seem like much more than a scrap of fabric—it doesn’t even have a back, just a slender tie at the neck and around her ribs. She wonders what it says about the roles of women I the Fire Nation that under their clothes they’re so unsupported, so uncovered, while she pulls back her hair, lost in the twisting rhythm of her braid.

She’s reminded of Zuko’s presence by a small “hah” sound she thinks may have only been meant for himself, and his pants flying through the air to the ground. Either she’s right about the Fire Nation and sleeping in underwear, or no one has told him about sleepwear either, because he’s successfully made it down to a pair of shorts not altogether different than what she’s wearing and says nothing about adding anything else.

“Did you just get excited about getting your pants over your legs?” she needles him, feeling self-conscious now in so little clothing but feeling somehow better about it by irritating him. He scowls at her.

“When you’ve never had legs before you let me know if you can do better,” he says flatly, and turns away from her, beginning the awkward process of dragging his awkward body up toward the pillows. He seems to have mastered knee-bending and hip-lifting only on a situational basis: he struggles to get the sheets pulled out from under him and to slide his legs beneath. Katara pulls the covers back for him. He doesn’t thank her. She’s glad he doesn’t.

She watches him force his long, uncooperative legs under the sheets for a moment before turning to get the light, waiting just long enough to see him roll over toward the wall to her never-ending relief. When she crawls into bed beside him she faces the other way, toward the room at large, and curls up right at the very edge of the mattress, though the bed is so small that even then she can feel the heat of his bare back on hers. It takes her a long time to fall asleep.

Zuko

____________________

Zuko never falls asleep. He’s been on a ship once before and then he’d found the constant motion soothing, then, but tonight he feels every rock and bump and subtle pitch as though he were floating directly on the water instead of encased in metal hull, like the ocean is alive round him, crashing waves right up against this tiny bed. It only barely fits two people, and that’s the other reason he can’t sleep: no matter how far he rolls to the edge of the mattress, Katara remains too close. He doesn’t trust himself to be unconscious with her _right there_ —he never used to move around in his sleep, but that was before he had legs to kick and stretch beneath the sheets, or the ability to roll from one side to another, and he’s so aware of her back inches from him, how if he faced the wrong direction he’d have his face in her braid, her almost entirely bare back. His nose doesn’t stick out anymore the way his entire face used to, but he imagines losing track of it anyway, coming too close and inhaling the scent of her skin directly off of her soft-looking shoulder. The thought does involuntary things to him he isn’t used to his body doing, heat and rushing blood moving to parts that didn’t used to feel so exposed and as such weren’t so sensitive, though his next immediate thought of how likely she would be to jam her elbow into his nose if she woke up with his lips against her shoulder helps to quell some of that reaction.

It would have been easier to just sleep on the floor after all, he thinks, but he’s not sure he has the coordination to move there now without waking her, or if he wants to try and explain himself. _“I couldn’t sleep because you were close to me”_ seems insulting, somehow, and _“I couldn’t sleep because you were close to me and you’re beautiful”_ is something he’s fairly certain she wouldn’t care to hear from him, and contrary to what she seems to think, upsetting her intentionally isn’t actually on his list of things to do—a few jabs in the heat of the moment excepted. She stirs an irritable kind of anger in him, sometimes, that he’d thought he’d grown out of.

Maybe, he thinks, bringing her back to her people for a little while will cool some of her resentment, assuming it doesn’t make it worse. Part of him is tempted to just leave her there, accept the scandal of a separation, let the nobility talk, but his father would see it as a disgusting kind of impotence. And then there are the conditions of the peace contingent on her marriage to him—surely, an actual marriage is required in a marriage-for-ceasefire arrangement. He isn’t looking forward to the possibility that he might have to remind her of that.

A willing bride worthy of a prince. That’s all he’d asked for, expecting that much to be impossible. Not unless his father granted him the kind of political legitimacy that a woman might be willing to accept a monster to gain. He’d underestimated his father. How clever he can be. How loosely he was prepared to interpret the idea of a “royal” or at least noble bride. The concessions he’d be willing to make—peace with the Southerners—just to do something underhanded to his son.

Maybe he should tell Katara all of that.

Maybe he should _never_ tell Katara any of that.

That’s what he mulls over while sleep resists him: whether she’d be likely to throttle him for having dragged her into a marriage that was contrived in the first place, or if she would feel less put-upon if she knew he’d never actually intended to make some poor woman attach to him. Not without more reward than he can currently offer, anyway.

He’s still wondering what he’ll ever be able to offer her—nothing, if he can’t gain more of his father’s good graces than this—when she begins to stir beside him with the dawn.

* * *

Their first full day on the ship, Katara disappears. She says something about wanting to walk the deck after breakfast and leaves him pointedly behind in their room. He takes the time to attempt some control over his legs, sliding off of the bed far enough to put his feet on the floor then slowly increasing the weight he places in them until he’s able to lift his torso off the mattress. It’s the straightening at the waist after that which he can’t get—at some point he has to pull himself back into bed and sit there practicing the motion of straightening his body out then closing it up again, and repeat, until the core of his torso is burning with exertion and he’s grown sick of looking at the ceiling. Certain he now at least understands where the bend in his waist and flexion in his hips _is,_ he tries to stand again.

But by the time Katara finally comes back, just in time for dinner, he can get out of bed on his own, and so the day is worth it.

And that night, he’s exhausted enough to sleep.

When Katara prepares to leave the next morning after breakfast Zuko asks to come with her. Her mouth becomes a flat, unforgiving line.

“You want to come _walk the deck,_ ” she says.

“I need the practice,” he answers.

“How’s that coming?” she asks. “Walking, standing, having legs.”

“It’s coming along. You don’t have to teach me _everything_.”

She makes a strange face that doesn’t seem entirely angry, then offers him her arm.

* * *

They walk the deck for hours, with periodic breaks seated on a pile of crates near the below-decks door, or leaning against the railing. Katara is strong, she takes what weight he has to lean into her—though he tries to keep most of it on the deck’s smooth-welded railing—without much apparent struggle and a look of stiff, stony neutrality on her face, all the dignity that he lacks as he forces his legs through motions that sometimes start to feel rhythmic but other times evade him. Unlike hands and fingers and talking—for which he’d at least had the experience in his tongue if not in shaping his lips—he has no muscle memory of walking upright from his old body, and he struggles to find the place where the movement feels natural, where he doesn’t have to think so much about it. Where his face and his hands have connected to some existing part of his brain capable of bridging the gap between concept and execution, there is no reference for walking or standing. Though he’s getting pretty good at standing.

At mid-day they stop by the railing for a while, Katara having retracted to a respectable distance from him so long as she doesn’t have to be there to stabilize his steps. She leans out over the water, arms crossed on the railing. He stands back, trying not to let her see that he’s watching her. This is the most he’s ever seen of her in the sunlight—real sunlight, not just sneaking in from the garden, but direct overhead with an energy pouring down that some part of him that remembers bending still thinks it can feel. It turns strands of her braid a red-tinged gold, the lighter core of her hair, still dark but definitely _brown_ , radiating from the center of each strand. Her skin now that they’re sailing away from the sheen of humidity looks soft, somehow, dry and warm, like the dark color is absorbing the sun itself the way bare earth does. There’s a radiance to it that evades logic, that makes the gold thread in her clothes seem dull and tacky by comparison, like it’s trying too hard. He can’t explain why—every comparison in his mind, an ornate frame on a simple painting, book binding for a single poem, feels like the kind of thing that would somehow turn into an insult if it ever made it out of his mouth.

He wonders what she’d do if he did try to compliment her. Not sure where to begin though, he settles by stating observations of fact.

“You seem like you’re used to being on the water,” he says. She glances at him for just a moment, a flash of eyes that make the ocean and sky alike seem dull.

“Not on large ships,” she says. “But my people live on the water. It’s where we do most of our hunting and fishing—nothing much lives inland. Water plants are also some of the only kind we have.”

“Seaweed?”

She nods.

“That’s even popular in the Fire Nation.”

“I know,” she says, “it’s most of what I’ve been eating. Everything else has too much spice in it.”

“There’s no such thing,” he says, feeling personally affronted on some level: spicy foods always had the most taste for him. If Uncle would have allowed him to live on raw meat and fireflakes through his teens, he probably would have.

“I promise you, there is,” she says tartly, with far more resentment than food can possibly deserve.

“What, don’t you spice anything in the Water Tribe?”

“Of course we have spices,” she spits. “Just not as many as we used to, maybe. When the Fire Nation conquered our trade partners in the southern Earth Kingdom, it changed a lot. There are materials and goods we traded for centuries that no one has seen in a hundred years.”

“Why don’t you trade with the Fire Nation in those areas instead?”

She looks over her shoulder at him to glare.

“Because the Fire Nation doesn’t make trade deals, they take what they want if they really want it, and they won’t pay full price for anything they can extort. Besides, the tariffs to even make port are ridiculous. Don’t you know that? Didn’t your royal tutors explains the ins and out of Fire Nation trade policies?” she says it with such scorn.

“They did. They said those policies have been enormously successful.”

“For _you,_ maybe,” she says with a grimace. “From a cost perspective. But there are things you’re no longer getting—and no one in the South Pole or North Pole are buying . . . really, you’re down to a few Earth Kingdom colonies after what, a hundred years of war?”

She throws him a look that goes beyond smug and into interrogative, bright patient eyes waiting on him to defend a hundred years’ worth of policymaking.

“The cost perspective matters,” he says. Her mouth opens for a second as if she’s going to try and debate the point but closes it again immediately, which is disappointing in some way he can’t pin down—they fight enough without a political debate about the merits of diversifying trade. Yet, he likes the idea that she _could_ have that debate. So he presses her. “What do you think we’re not getting the way things are?”

“We as in the Fire Nation, or we as in everyone else in the world? Because I’ve been in the Fire Nation for two days. I don’t have the first clue what your people want or need.”

He considers reminding her that they’re her people now, too, but thinks better of it.

“Then tell me about everywhere else.”

“How about I show you?” she says, pivoting to lean her back against the railing. She slings her elbows over it. The pose puts an arch in her back and pushes her chest out, and the way she throws her head back to look up at him exposes the smooth skin of her throat and exaggerates the sharp angle of her jaw. He wonders if she has any idea how it all looks, or if she thinks the long breath he has to take before he can respond to her is something else.

“How so?” he asks, finally.

“When we get ho—to the South Pole, I’ll show you what things were like before. And you can see what things are like now.”

“Because of the Fire Nation?”

“Because of the Fire Nation.”

He narrows his eyes at her, trying to make it clear in his expression how unimpressed he is with her bias, but says “sure,” and after that, he can’t seem to pick up any other thread of conversation. They return to walking the deck in silence.

By sunset, Zuko can walk entirely without her. It feels stilted, but he’s upright, and he stays that way, except for one moment, just at dusk, when a rogue wave rears up on the horizon and knocks hard against the side of the ship. The deck bucks and Zuko scrambles, lurching against the railing until he’s tipped over it, staring down at the darkening water, acutely aware that even before he had legs he never knew how to swim. But then something drags at the collar of his clothes, yanking him back.

He ends up sprawled on the deck, staring into the hazy purple of the sky, pinpricked by stars. He lifts his dizzy head and there is Katara, arm still outstretched from throwing him.

They stare at each other for a moment in silence.

“You’re welcome,” she eventually says, looking askance, everywhere but his face. She’s scowling.

“Right,” he says, “thanks. Yeah. Good catch.”

“Lucky catch,” she says, still not looking at him.

“Not sure it’s luck,” he says. _I think it’s just you._

Katara retorts “whatever,” and begrudgingly helps him to his feet. It’s only as she’s doing so that it finally occurs to him what the one drawback of mastering his own body will be: if he can stand and walk and scrape himself off the floor—if nothing else—there will no longer be reason for her to touch him.

When she takes his hand to help him to his feet, he focuses too hard on it, trying to memorize the feeling of her skin in case he never feels it again.


End file.
